OBERMANN 


VOLUME   I 


OBERM  ANN 

SELECTIONS    FROM 


Cfosen  and  translated  with  an  Introductory 
"Essay  and  Notes  by  JESSIE  PEABODY 
FROTHINGHAM,  Translator  of  the 
Journal  of  Maurice  de  Guerin 

VOLUME     ONE 


fhe  RIVERSIDE  PRESS,  Cambridge 
1901 


4 

• 


Copyright,  1901 
By  Jessie  Peabody  Frotbingham 

All  rights  reserved 
I 


ro  Mr  MOTHER 

Whose  unfailing  encouragement  and 

criticism  have  been  my  help 

and  inspiration 

I   DEDICATE  THESE  VOLUMES 


I 


,   '    I 


FROM 

STANZAS  IN  MEMORY  OF 

THE  AUTHOR  OF 

OBERMANN 


A  FEVER  in  these  pages  burns 
Beneath  the  calm  they  feign ; 
A  wounded  human  spirit  turns 
Here,  on  its  bed  of  pain. 

Yes,  though  the  virgin  mountain-air 
Fresh  through  these  pages  blows ; 
Though   to   these   leaves   the  glaciers 

spare 
The  soul  of  their  mute  snows ; 

Though    here    a    mountain  -  murmur 

swells 
Of  many  a  dark-boughed  pine ; 


" 


* 


vi  STANZAS 

Though,  as  you  read,  you  hear  the  bells 
Of  the  high-pasturing  kine  — 

Yet,  through  the  hum  of  torrent  lone, 
And  brooding  mountain-bee, 
There  sobs  I  know  not  what  ground- 
tone 
Of  human  agony. 

MATTHEW  ARNOLD. 


• 


* 


PR E FA  C  E 


IN  offering  to  the  public  for  the  Jlrst 
time  a  translation  of  OBERMANN,'  an 
explanation  is  scarcely  needed;  for  although 
Benancourhasfor  a  hundred  years  remained 
comparatively  unknown,  his  writings  must 
appeal  to  every  lover  of  nature  as  much  as, 
or  perhaps  in  some  ways  even  more  than,  the 
works  of  Amiel  and  Maurice  de  Guerin, 
whose  precursor  he  was,  and  both  of  whom 
have  already  been  presented  to  British  and 
American  readers.  But  while  the  charm 
O/*OBERMANN  lies  chiefly  in  its  subtle  and 
strong  delineation  of  material  nature,  it  is 
not  this  alone  that  challenges  attention.  As 
a  monody  on  human  experience  it  may  well 
attract  many  who  are  interested  in  the  prob- 
lem of  life. 

In  making  selections  from  OBERMANN 


viii  PREFACE 

it  has  been  my  aim  to  lay  stress  upon  these 
two  sides,  as  well  as  to  emphasize  Senan- 
cour's  aversion  to  the  established  order  of 
things ;  an  aversion  from  which  sprang  a 
large  part  of  his  inward  discontent.  'This 
has  obliged  me  to  include  many  passages 
of  an  introspective  character,  thus  over- 
accentuating,  perhaps,  the  author's  ten- 
dency to  self-analysis ;  but  these  passages 
usually  form  the  prelude  to  meditations  on 
life  and  nature  too  valuable  to  be  omitted. 

*/ 

Although  in  France  the  admirers  of  Senan- 
cour  dwell  at  length  upon  the  importance 
of  his  philosophy,  for  us  his  chief  claim  to 
recognition  must  rest  on  his  deep  under- 
standing of  the  human  heart,  his  constant 
groping  after  truth,  his  realization  of  what 
there  is  of  sad  and  inscrutable  in  life,  and 
his  love  of  the  beautiful  and  the  sublime  in 
nature.  'These  qualities  of  the  poet,  which 
give  him  whatever  right  he  may  have  to 
greatness,  have  received  the  larger  share  of 
attention.  As  a  logician  he  is  not  equally 
strong ;  I  have  therefore  left  untranslated 


PREFACE  ix 

many  long  arguments  and  deductions  which 
in  style  fall  below  his  highest  level,  and  de- 
tract from  rather  than  add  to  the  beauty 
and  harmony  of  the  rest. 

To  translate  OBERMANN  has  been  an 
interesting,  though  not  an  easy  work.  M. 
yules  Levallois,  the  most  ardent  modern 
exponent  of  the  poet-philosopher,  and  for 
years  a  close  student  of  his  works,  himself 
acknowledges  that  it  is  difficult  to  under- 
stand Senancour  ;  for  his  meaning  is  often 
subtly  hidden,  suggested  rather  than  ex- 
pressed. His  extreme  literary  reserve,  which 
made  him  shun  the  favor  of  the  multitude, 
led  him,  perhaps,  to  'veil  his  thought,  and 
leave  it  half-untold,  as  it  were,  but  clothed 
in  a  wealth  of  imagery. 

It  has  also  been  difficult  at  times  to 
reconcile  an  attempt  to  preserve  to  a  certain 
degree  the  original  style  and  rhythm,  with 
a  desire  to  use  English  literary  form.  In 
some  places  I  have  allowed  myself  consid- 
erable freedom  where  the  composition  of  the 
sentences  seemed  intricate  and  involved,  at 


PREFACE 

times  I  have  translated  the  meaning  rather 
than  the  words,  and  in  other  places  I  have 
adhered  to  an  almost  literal  rendering.  My 
hope  is  that  the  remarkable  beauty  and 
power  of  Senancour's  expression  may  not 
have  been  entirely  lost  in  the  translation. 

J.  P.  F. 


»  * 

.  .  •  *     • 

*  -          • 

' 

•  • 


I 

• 


. 
. 


• 


• 
I 


INTRODUCTION 


IN  November,  1849,  Matthew  Ar- 
nold, then  a  young  man  of  twenty- 
seven,  almost  at  the  beginning  of  his 
literary  career,  wrote  some  stanzas  in 
memory  of  the  author  of  Obermann, 
an  obscure  French  poet,  whose  name 
and  writings  had,  until  then,  been 
scarcely  known  outside  of  France,  and 
who  had  died  almost  unnoticed  three 
years  before.  These  were  followed, 
many  years  after,  by  other  stanzas, 
Obermann  Once  More.  It  is  through 
these  two  poems  by  Matthew  Arnold 
that  the  author  of  Obermann,  Etienne 
Pivert  de  Senancour,  has  been  chiefly 
known  to  the  reading  public  of  Eng- 
land and  America.  But  while  his  name 
has  in  this  way  become  familiar  to 


xii        INTRODUCTION 

many,  his  writings  have  never  attained 
celebrity ;  and,  even  in  his  own  coun- 
try, he  is  not  famous.  The  prose  poem, 
Obermann,  has  been  read  by  a  few  who 
have  been  attracted  by  its  rare  poetic 
quality  and  interpretative  power,  but  it 
has  not  received  general  recognition, 
nor  been  awarded  by  the  public  its  just 
rank  as  a  work  of  marked  talent. 

There  are  good  reasons  why  the  au- 
thor of  Obermann  should  have  remained 
without  fame  beyond  a  narrow  circle 
of  admirers,  as  we  shall  see  by  a  study 
of  his  character.  His  own  description 
of  this  isolation,  which  oppressed  him, 
even  though  he  sought  it,  is  filled  with 
a  sense  of  pain.  On  the  1 2th  of  Octo- 
ber, in  Letter  XXII,  he  writes  from 
Fontainebleau  :  — 

"  I  am  alone.  ...  I  am  here  in  the 
world,  a  wanderer,  solitary  in  the  midst 
of  a  people  for  whom  I  care  nothing ; 
like  a  man,  deaf  for  many  years,  whose 
eager  eyes  gaze  upon  the  crowd  of  silent 


INTRODUCTION       xiii 

beings  who  move  and  pass  before  him. 
He  sees  everything,  but  everything  is 
withheld  from  him ;  he  suffers  the  si- 
lence of  all  things  in  the  midst  of  the 
noise  of  the  world ;  ...  he  is  apart 
from  the  entirety  of  beings;  ...  in 
vain  do  all  things  exist  around  him  ;  he 
lives  alone,  he  is  isolated  in  the  midst 
of  the  living  world." 

Although  the  author  of  Obermann 
separated  himself  by  choice  from  the 
life  of  his  times,  and,  while  the  tur- 
moil of  events  swept  past  him,  stood 
apart  as  a  solitary  figure,  deaf  to  their 
noise  and  seemingly  unconscious  of 
their  object,  yet  he  must  take  his  place 
as  a  member  —  the  most  isolated,  it  is 
true  —  of  the  sentimental  democratic 
movement  which  had  its  rise  in  the 
second  half  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
By  right  of  talent,  through  affinity  of 
sentiment  and  feeling,  he  belonged  to 
that  romantic  school  of  France  which 
was  the  successor  of  classicism  and  in- 


• 
i 


xiv       INTRODUCTION 

tellectual  atheism,  and  numbered  in  its 
ranks  a  Rousseau,  a  Bernardin  de  St. 
Pierre,  a  Chateaubriand,  a  Madame  de 
Stael,  whose  names  sounded  like  clarion 
notes  through  the  end  of  the  eighteenth 
century  and  the  first  half  of  the  nine- 
teenth. But  even  the  gentler  lights 
among  the  pantheists  of  French  litera- 
ture, Vigny,  Maurice  de  Guerin,  La- 
martine,  Musset,  Amiel,  received  wider 
recognition  than  the  solitary  dreamer 
who  has,  nevertheless,  written  pages 
more  beautiful,  perhaps,  in  their  sim- 
plicity, charm,  grandeur  even,  than 
have  many  of  his  better  known  con- 
temporaries or  successors. 

These  pages,  which  formed  the  re- 
pository of  the  intimate  personal  reve- 
ries of  a  nature  delicately  responsive 
to  every  impression  and  emotion,  and 
which  contained  a  depth  of  feeling  and 
experience  not  appreciated  by  the  many, 
were,  however,  we  are  told  by  Sainte- 
Beuve,  cherished  by  a  small  band  of 


INTRODUCTION         xv 

admirers,  —  Sautelet,  Bastide,  Ampere, 
Stapfer,  Nodier,  —  young  and  ardent 
spirits,  who  looked  up  to  their  author 
with  reverence  as  to  a  master,  and  by 
a  group  of  men  of  letters  which  counted 
such  names  as  Rabbe,  Ballanche,  Pierre 
Leroux,  and  Boisjolin  the  editor  of  the 
second  edition  of  Obermann.  More  than 
this,  Sainte-Beuve  himself,  George  Sand, 
and  in  recent  years  Jules  Levallois,  at- 
tracted by  his  rare  gifts  and  his  singu- 
lar charm,  have  done  for  him  in  France 
what  Matthew  Arnold  has  done  in  Eng- 
land, and  Alvar  Torniidd  in  Finland : 
they  have  made  him  a  name  to  the 
many  and  more  than  a  name  to  the 
few  who  appreciate  beauty  of  style  and 
the  poet's  power  to  interpret  nature. 

Several  of  the  writers  of  the  roman- 
tic school  possessed  to  a  remarkable 
degree  this  gift  of  rendering  nature. 
Chateaubriand  possessed  it,  though 
often  in  a  studied  form ;  Maurice  de 
Guerin  had  it  in  all  its  naturalness  and 

» 

•   * 

*     » 

•  .  • 

*  *      ' 

. 

*• 
* 


*  * 


xvi        INTRODUCTION 

grace  ;  Senancour  had  it  with  a  sim- 
plicity, grandeur,  and  eloquence  which 
have  seldom  been  surpassed.  He  has 
given  us  pictures  of  singular  beauty, 
both  as  a  landscapist  and  as  a  poet ;  for 
he  not  only  paints  nature  in  her  out- 
ward semblance,  but  he  leads  us  into 
close  companionship  with  what  is  hid- 
den and  intimate  in  her  life.  This  is 
why  Obermann  has  outlived  obscurity. 
Although  Senancour  made  no  use  of 
metrical  form,  he  held  more  of  the 
poetic  gift  of  understanding  and  appre- 
ciating nature,  and  of  interpreting  her 
with  subtle  sympathy,  than  did  many 
poets  who  wrote  in  verse.  And  in  this 
feeling  for  nature  he  was  perhaps  less 
akin  to  Lamartine,  the  chief  singer  of 
French  romanticism,  than  to  Words- 
worth and  others  among  the  English 
poets. 

It  may  appear  singular  that  the  only 
countries  where  the  works  of  Senan- 
cour have  been  widely  appreciated  are 


INTRODUCTION      xvii 

the  lands  of  the  far  north,  Finland, 
Sweden,  and  Norway.  But  his  strong 
sympathy  with  all  that  was  primitively 
sublime  and  titanic  in  nature  and  in 
man,  which  inspired  him  to  write  in 
Obermann,  "  It  is  to  the  lands  of  the 
north  that  belong  the  heroism  born  of 
enthusiasm,  and  the  titanic  dreams  bred 
of  sublime  melancholy,"  must  have 
formed  a  powerful  attraction  for  a  peo- 
ple whose  early  literature  represented 
types  of  primeval  man  and  nature. 

Qbermann,  written  during  1801  to 
1803,  and  first  published  in  1804,  is  a 
book  of  disconnected  impressions  and 
meditations,  in  the  form  of  letters  to  a 
friend,  containing  the  reveries  of  a  re- 
cluse on  life  and  nature.  But  although 
Obermann  is  an  internal  autobiography 
of  Senancour,  we  must  guard  against 
taking  too  literally  its  external  details, 
for  the  author  purposely  altered  facts 
and  dates  in  order  to  mislead  the  reader. 

Etienne  Pivertde  Senancour  was  born 


xviii      INTRODUCTION 

in  Paris  in  1 770,  the  year  of  the  birth 
of  Wordsworth.  His  father,  who  be- 
longed to  a  noble  and  a  comparatively 
rich  family  of  Lorraine,  and  who  held 
the  office  of  comptroller  of  the  reve- 
nues under  Louis  XVI,  was  a  man  of 
inflexible  will,  and  of  small  sympathy 
with  youth  or  with  what  goes  to  make 
youth  gay.  Young  Senancour's  child- 
hood was  not  happy ;  he  had  little 
companionship,  and  no  pleasures.  A 
profoundly  melancholy  temperament, 
given  him  by  nature,  developed  by  all 
the  conditions  of  his  home  life,  made 
him  prematurely  sombre  and  discon- 
tented ;  ill  health  and  his  father's  stern- 
ness increased  a  self-repression,  apathy, 
and  awkwardness  which  were  the  re- 
sult partly  of  physical  immaturity  and 
partly  of  mental  precocity.  Romantic 
from  childhood,  thirsting  for  joy  with 
an  intensity  rarely  seen  in  one  so  young, 
receiving  back  from  life  only  disillu- 
sions and  unsatisfied  longings,  he  soon 


INTRODUCTION       xix 

became  acquainted  with  suffering,  and 
could  say  with  reason  that  he  had  never 
been  young.  Born  without  the  power, 
but  with  the  fierce  desire  for  happiness, 
his  "joy  in  everything"  was  withered 
before  it  bloomed.  The  few  allusions 
in  Obermann  to  those  early  years  show 
how  greatly  they  influenced  his  after 
life.  But  among  these  memories  of  his 
youth,  one  ray  of  content  pierces  now 
and  then  the  general  gloom,  —  his  love 
for  his  mother,  and  her  sympathy  with 
him.  Later,  after  death  had  separated 
him  from  her,  he  pictures,  with  un- 
wonted tenderness,  the  walks  they  took 
together  in  the  woods  of  Fontainebleau, 
when  he  was  a  schoolboy  spending  his 
vacations  with  his  parents  in  the  coun- 
try. He  was  only  fifteen  at  that  time, 
but  showed  even  then  his  love  for  all 
things  beautiful  in  nature,  his  longing 
for  solitude,  his  premature  seriousness, 
his  changeful  moods,  his  ardent,  sensi- 
tive, restless  temperament  which  gave 


xx        INTRODUCTION 

him  no  peace.  At  Paris,  on  the  27th 
of  June,  in  Letter  XI,  this  recollection 
comes  to  him  as  an  inspiration  :  — 

"  The  first  time  I  went  to  the  forest 
I  was  not  alone.  ...  I  plunged  into 
the  densest  part  of  the  woods,  and  when 
I  reached  a  clearing,  shut  in  on  all  sides, 
where  nothing  could  be  seen  but  stretches 
of  sand  and  of  juniper-trees,  there  came 
to  me  a  sense  of  peace,  of  liberty,  of 
savage  joy,  the  sway  of  nature  first  felt 
in  careless  youth.  .  .  .  Often  I  was  in 
the  forest  before  the  rising  of  the  sun. 
I  climbed  the  hills  still  deep  in  shadow ; 
I  was  all  wet  from  the  dew-covered 
underbrush  ;  and  when  the  sun  shone 
out  I  still  longed  for  that  mystic  light, 
precursor  of  the  dawn.  I  loved  the 
deep  gullies,  the  dark  valleys,  the  dense 
woods ;  I  loved  the  hills  covered  with 
heather ;  I  loved  the  fallen  boulders 
and  the  rugged  rocks,  and,  still  better,  I 
loved  the  moving  sands,  their  barren 
wastes  untrodden  by  the  foot  of  man, 


INTRODUCTION       xxi 

but  furrowed  here  and  there  by  the 
restless  tracks  of  the  roe  or  the  fleeing 
hare.  ...  It  was  then  that  I  noticed 
the  birch,  a  lonely  tree  which  even  in 
those  days  rilled  me  with  sadness,  and 
which,  since  that  time,  I  have  never 
seen  without  a  sense  of  pleasure.  I  love 
the  birch  •  I  love  that  smooth,  white, 
curling  bark ;  that  wild  trunk ;  those 
drooping  branches ;  the  flutter  of  the 
leaves,  and  all  that  abandonment,  simpli- 
city of  nature,  attitude  of  the  desert." 

Here,  then,  at  Fontainebleau,  came 
the  first  awakening  of  his  feeling  for 
nature,  —  a  feeling  which  had  perhaps 
already  been  unconsciously  stirred  at 
Ermenonville,  a  small  village  in  the 
Valois,  where  Rousseau  had  died  a  few 
years  before,  in  1778.  Young  Senan- 
cour,  who  had  early  shown  his  love  of 
study,  and,  when  only  seven  years  old, 
had  devoured  with  feverish  ardor  every 
book  of  travel  that  fell  into  his  hands, 
had  been  sent  to  school  at  Ermenon- 


xxii      INTRODUCTION 

ville,  and  lived  with  the  cure  of  the 
parish.  There,  as  an  impressionable 
boy,  he  must  have  stood  by  the  tomb 
of  Rousseau ;  must  have  wandered  in 
the  castle  grounds  where  Rousseau  had 
lived  before  his  death ;  have  listened  to 
the  "  rustling  leaves  of  the  birches ;  " 
have  seen  "  the  quiet  waters,  the  cas- 
cade among  the  rocks,  .  .  .  and  the 
green  that  stretches  beyond  like  a  prai- 
rie, above  which  rise  wooded  slopes," 
as  Gerard  de  Nerval,  in  Sylvie,  pictures 
it  to  us  in  the  first  quarter  of  the  nine- 
teenth century. 

At  fifteen  Senancour  entered  the 
College  de  la  Marche,  at  Paris,  where 
he  followed  the  four  years*  course  dili- 
gently, not  brilliantly,  but  successfully, 
and  graduated  with  honor.  In  those 
four  years,  his  mind,  already  open  to 
philosophic  doubt,  was  definitely  led 
into  channels  which  destroyed  whatever 
religious  belief  may  have  been  feebly 
lodged  there  by  his  mother's  teaching. 


INTRODUCTION  xxiii 
He  left  college  an  atheist.  It  had  been 
the  intention  of  the  elder  Senancour 
that  his  son  should  enter  the  priest- 
hood, and  being  a  man  of  imperious 
will,  unaccustomed  to  remonstrance  or 
opposition,  he  immediately  made  ar- 
rangements for  Etienne  to  take  a  two 
years'  preparatory  course  at  the  semi- 
nary of  Saint-Sulpice. 

By  nature  without  depth  of  Chris- 
tian religious  feeling,  by  temperament 
fiercely  opposed  to  rules  and  institu- 
tions, by  education  steeped  in  the  phi- 
losophic thought  of  the  day,  the  young 
student  of  Malebranche  and  Helvetius 
rose  in  revolt  against  a  step  which 
"essentially  shocked  his  nature."  In 
August,  1789,  with  the  help  of  his 
mother,  he  left  Paris,  and  buried  him- 
self in  the  solitudes  of  the  Swiss  Alps : 
there,  in  the  region  of  perpetual  ice, 
the  primitive  man  in  him  strove  to 
wrest  from  primitive  nature  the  key  to 
life. 


xxiv     INTRODUCTION 

At  this  period,  when  we  see  in  him 
so  much  to  "  essentially  shock"  our 
natures,  —  his  atheism,  his  antagonism 
to  Christianity,  his  bitterness  against 
institutions,  —  he  has  at  least  the  merit 
of  austere  sincerity  and  of  scrupulous 
morality.  With  a  nature  so  sincere  and 
so  strongly  opposed  to  a  religious  voca- 
tion, he  could  not  bring  himself  to 
enter  the  priesthood  solely  for  the  sake 
of  earning  a  living,  or  to  play  the  hyp- 
ocrite in  order  to  satisfy  an  exacting 
parent. 

"  I  could  not  sacrifice  my  manhood," 
he  protests,  "  in  order  to  become  a 
man  of  affairs." 

And  in  another  place,  in  the  same 
letter,  he  says  :  — 

"  It  is  not  enough  to  look  upon  a 
profession  as  honest  for  the  simple  rea- 
son that  one  can  earn  an  income  of 
thirty  or  forty  thousand  francs  without 
theft." 

Sincerity  he  regarded  as  one  of  the 


natural,  simple  virtues.  The  grander 
virtues  he  had  also  known ;  he  writes :  — 

"  I  have  known  the  enthusiasm  of 
the  great  virtues.  .  .  f  My  stoical 
strength  braved  misfortunes  as  well  as 
passions  ;  and  I  felt  sure  that  I  should 
be  the  happiest  of  men  if  I  were  the 
most  virtuous/* 

This  stoicism  was  merely  a  phase ; 
it  went  hand  in  hand  with  an  atheism 
and  a  fatalism  which  were  also  nothing 
more  than  phases ;  they  were  not  de- 
stined to  endure  long,  but  they  pro- 
duced his  first  work,  Reveries  sur  la 
Nature  Primitive  de  I'Homme,  written 
during  the  early  years  of  his  exile  in 
Switzerland,  and  published  in  1799, 
when  he  had  returned  secretly  to  Paris. 
During  those  ten  years  France  had 
passed  through  her  great  crisis  ;  but  the 
distant  rumblings  of  the  Revolution 
which  had  shaken  his  country  to  her 
foundations,  and  had  reechoed  through- 
out Europe,  seem  to  have  left  Senan- 


xxvi      INTRODUCTION 

cour  unmoved.  Buried  in  his  mountain 
solitudes,  surrounded  by  the  silence  of 
the  snows,  absorbed  in  the  contempla- 
tion of  natural  forces,  he  remained  ap- 
parently unconscious  of  the  movement 
of  the  gigantic  social  forces  around 
him.  He  represents  passivity  in  an  age 
of  intense  moral  and  social  activity,  the 
sage  among  soldiers,  the  dreamer  of 
ideas  for  which  the  rest  of  the  world 
were  fighting,  the  believer  in  a  new 
system  which  was  even  then  overturn- 
ing society,  and  which  fifty  years  later 
was  to  produce  men  of  his  stamp. 

But  the  Revolution  which  he  ig- 
nored did  not  pass  him  by  unnoticed,  as 
he  might  have  wished.  His  noble  an- 
cestry and  his  abrupt  departure  from 
Paris  immediately  before  the  outbreak 
of  the  Revolution  were  sufficient  rea- 
sons to  lay  him  open  to  suspicion,  and 
for  him  to  be  classed  as  an  "  emigre  ;  " 
thus  his  voluntary  retirement  was  turned 
into  a  forced  exile.  Obliged  for  politi- 


INTRODUCTION     xxvii 

cal  reasons  to  make  Switzerland  his 
home,  we  find  him,  not  long  after  his 
arrival,  living  in  the  house  of  a  patri- 
cian family  in  the  canton  of  Fribourg. 
A  daughter  of  the  house,  unhappy  in 
her  home,  and  in  her  engagement  to  a 
man  for  whom  she  had  no  attachment, 
became  interested  in  Senancour ;  they 
saw  each  other  constantly,  even  began 
to  write  a  romance  together ;  she  con- 
fided her  troubles  to  him,  and  at  last 
broke  her  engagement.  Young  Senan- 
cour, sensitive,  scrupulous,  believing 
himself  to  be  morally,  though  uninten- 
tionally, bound  to  the  young  girl,  mar- 
ried her  in  1790,  at  the  age  of  twenty. 
The  marriage  was  not  a  happy  one ; 
but  he  remained  a  devoted  husband  un- 
til his  wife's  early  death.  He  had  been 
in  love  once,  some  years  before,  —  a 
transient  fancy,  as  he  then  thought, 
but  one  that  had  for  a  moment  opened 
before  him  visions  of  happiness  which 
might  have  been  his,  and  that  returned 


xxviii     INTRODUCTION 

to  him,  in  later  years,  with  almost  over- 
whelming force  in  the  hour  of  his  great 
moral  crisis. 

In  Letter  XI,  from  Paris,  he  writes: — 
"  It  was  in  March ;  I  was  at  Lu — . 
There  were  violets  at  the  foot  of  the 
thickets,  and  lilacs  in  a  little  meadow, 
springlike  and  peaceful,  open  to  the 
southern  sun.  The  house  stood  high 
above.  A  terraced  garden  hid  the  win- 
dows from  sight.  Below  the  meadow, 
steep  and  rugged  rocks  formed  wall 
upon  wall ;  at  the  foot,  a  wide  torrent, 
and  beyond,  other  ledges  covered  with 
fields,  with  hedges,  and  with  firs ! 
Across  all  this  stretched  the  ancient 
walls  of  the  city ;  an  owl  had  made  his 
home  among  the  ruined  towers.  In  the 
evening,  the  moon  shone,  distant  horns 
gave  answering  calls ;  and  the  voice  that 
I  shall  never  hear  again  ! " 

These  dreams  had  passed,  and  in 
their  place  had  come  misfortunes  in  a 
long  and  overwhelming  train.  The 


INTRODUCTION     xxix 

loss  of  his  fortune  through  the  French 
Revolution,  and  of  his  wife's  inheri- 
tance through  the  Swiss  Revolution,  a 
painful  nervous  trouble  which  deprived 
him  throughout  his  life  of  the  natural 
use  of  his  arms,  the  long  and  mortal 
illness  of  his  wife,  the  death  of  his 
father  and  of  his  much-loved  mother, 
separation  from  his  son  and  from  his 
friends,  —  all  these  formed  the  setting 
of  a  grief,  stifling  and  sombre,  that 
found  frequent  expression  in  the  book 
which  was  the  Journal  Intime  of  Se- 
nancour's  inward  experience. 

In  a  life  so  grave,  so  full  of  disillu- 
sions, Senancour  turned  for  support  to 
nature,  —  to  a  nature  calm,  broad,  ma- 
jestic, that  brought  him  moments  of 
content,  almost  of  happiness.  His  sen- 
sitive organization  responded  like  an 
echo  to  every  impression  from  the  nat- 
ural world,  yet  his  enjoyment  of  nature 
had  in  it  as  much  of  an  intellectual  as 
of  an  emotional  quality.  His  style  at- 


xxx       INTRODUCTION 

tracts  us,  not  so  much  from  the  sound 
of  the  words  as  from  the  musical  flow 
of  the  phrase  and  the  exquisitely  har- 
monious turn  of  the  sentence,  the  fall- 
ing cadence  at  the  close,  with  here  and 
there  a  sudden  break  in  the  rhythm. 
No  one  who  reads  Obermann  can  fail 
to  find  rare  delight  in  the  charm  of  its 
cadences,  in  the  remarkable  power  of 
language  which  it  shows,  and  in  the 
magic  faculty  of  the  artist  to  see  the 
elements  that  constitute  a  picture. 

On  the  1 9th  of  July,  in  Letter  IV, 
Senancour  writes  from  Thiel  of  a  night 
spent  on  the  shores  of  Lake  Neucha- 
teh  — 

"  In  the  evening,  before  the  rising 
of  the  moon,  I  walked  beside  the  green 
waters  of  the  Thiele.  Feeling  inclined 
to  dream,  and  finding  the  air  so  soft 
that  I  could  pass  the  whole  night  in 
the  open,  I  followed  the  road  to  Saint- 
Blaise.  At  the  small  village  of  Marin, 
I  turned  aside  to  the  lake  at  the  south, 


INTRODUCTION      xxxi 

and  descended  a  steep  bank  to  the  shore, 
where  the  waves  came  to  die  on  the 
sands.  The  air  was  calm,  not  a  sail 
could  be  seen  on  the  lake.  All  were  at 
rest,  some  in  the  forgetfulness  of  toil, 
others  in  the  oblivion  of  sorrow.  The 
moon  rose;  I  lingered  long.  Toward 
morning  she  spread  over  the  earth  and 
the  waters  the  ineffable  melancholy  of 
her  last  rays.  Nature  appears  immea- 
surably grand  when,  lost  in  reverie,  one 
hears  the  rippling  of  the  waves  upon 
the  solitary  shore,  in  the  calm  of  a 
night  still  resplendent  and  illumined  by 
the  setting  moon. 

"  Ineffable  sensibility,  charm  and  tor- 
ment of  our  fruitless  years,  profound 
realization  of  a  nature  everywhere  over- 
whelming and  everywhere  inscrutable, 
all-absorbing  passion,  deepened  wisdom, 
rapturous  self-abandonment,  —  all  that 
a  human  soul  can  experience  of  deep 
desire  and  world- weariness,  —  I  felt  it 
all,  I  lived  it  all  on  that  memorable 


xxxii    INTRODUCTION 

night.  I  have  taken  a  fatal  step  towards 
the  age  of  decay ;  I  have  consumed  ten 
years  of  my  life.  Happy  the  simple  man 
whose  heart  is  always  young  !  " 

This  passage  has  been  quoted  before  ; 
it  cannot  be  quoted  too  often.  There 
is  a  sentence  in  one  of  Emerson's  Let- 
ters to  a  Friend  that  reminds  one  of 
it ;  he  has  been  reading  the  Vedas 
"  in  the  sleep  of  the  great  heats,"  and 
writes :  — 

"  If  I  trust  myself  in  the  woods  or 
in  a  boat  upon  the  pond,  nature  makes 
a  Brahmin  of  me  presently  —  eternal 
necessity,  eternal  compensation,  unfath- 
omable power,  unbroken  silence,  this  is 
her  creed.  Peace,  she  saith  to  me,  and 
purity  and  absolute  abandonment." 

Less  lyrical  than  Maurice  de  Guerin, 
Senancour  was  more  of  a  Titan  in 
power  and  daring ;  he  was  an  epic 
poet  of  landscape.  Nature  in  her  bolder 
moods  appealed  to  him  most  strongly ; 
it  was  not  her  smiles,  her  graceful  fan- 


INTRODUCTION     xxxiii 

cies,  her  waywardness,  her  exuberance, 
that  moved  him,  as  they  did  the  lighter, 
more  "  elusive  "  temperament  of  Mau- 
rice de  Guerin ;  it  was  the  rugged  in 
her,  the  mysterious,  the  vast ;  he  loved 
to  grapple  with  the  strength,  the  diffi- 
culties of  a  wild  and  savage  region. 
And  in  this  he  showed  an  intellectual 
rather  than  a  sensuous  quality,  a  quality 
which  it  is  interesting  to  trace,  even  in 
the  words  used  to  express  the  elements 
in  nature  that  aroused  his  sympathy. 
Maurice  de  Guerin  was  attracted  by 
the  evanescence  and  grace  of  nature ; 
Senancour  by  her  "  permanence  "  and 
"  austerity."  This  austerity  and  per- 
manence are  especially  insisted  upon  in 
one  of  the  most  striking  of  the  Ober- 
mann  letters,  —  the  letter  in  which  he 
tells  of  a  day  spent  on  the  Dent  du 
Midi. 

On  the  3d  of  September,  in  Letter 
VII,  he  writes  from  Saint-Maurice  :  — 

"  I  have  been  to  the  region  of  per- 


xxxiv    INTRODUCTION 

petual  ice,  on  the  Dent  du  Midi.  Be- 
fore the  sun  shone  upon  the  valley  I  had 
already  reached  the  bluff  overlooking 
the  town,  and  was  crossing  the  partly 
cultivated  stretch  of  ground  which 
covers  it.  I  went  on  by  a  steep  ascent, 
through  dense  forests  of  fir-trees,  leveled 
in  many  places  by  winters  long  since 
passed  away :  fruitful  decay,  vast  and 
confused  mass  of  a  vegetation  that  had 
died  and  had  regerminated  from  the 
wrecks  of  its  former  life.  At  eight 
o'clock  I  had  reached  the  bare  summit 
which  crowns  the  ascent,  and  which 
forms  the  first  salient  step  in  that  won- 
drous pile  whose  highest  peak  still  rose 
so  far  beyond  me.  Then  I  dismissed  my 
guide,  and  put  my  own  powers  to  the 
test.  I  wanted  that  no  hireling  should 
intrude  upon  this  Alpine  liberty,  that 
no  man  of  the  plains  should  come  to 
weaken  the  austerity  of  these  savage  re- 
gions. ...  I  stood  fixed  and  exultant 
as  I  watched  the  rapid  disappearance 


INTRODUCTION     xxxv 

of  the  only  man  whom  I  was  likely  to 
see  among  these  mighty  precipices.  .  .  . 

"  I  cannot  give  you  a  true  impres- 
sion of  this  new  world,  nor  express  the 
permanence  of  the  mountains  in  the 
language  of  the  plains." 

The  whole  of  that  day  he  spent 
among  the  chasms,  the  granite  rocks, 
and  the  snows  of  the  Alps,  taken  pos- 
session of  by  the  inexpressible  perma- 
nence of  life  in  those  silent  regions, 
which  seemed  to  have  in  them  less  of 
change  than  of  immutability. 

We  can  see  the  landscapes  which 
Senancour  paints;  they  are  bold,  vivid, 
and  full  of  atmosphere.  And  we  can 
feel  the  mysterious  hidden  life  which  he 
feels  so  profoundly,  which  becomes  a 
passion  with  him,  subdues  him,  absorbs 
him,  until  he  has  grown  to  be  a  part 
of  it.  The  great  Pan  claims  him.  We 
must  not,  however,  mistake  Senancour. 
He  loves  nature,  but  to  him  man  is 
the  highest  part  of  nature ;  only,  man 


xxxvi    INTRODUCTION 

troubles  him  by  departing  from  primi- 
tive standards,  and  nature  does  not.  "  It 
is  true  I  love  only  nature,"  he  writes, 
"  but  men  are  still  the  part  of  nature 
that  I  love  the  best." 

It  is  not  social  man,  as  he  existed  at 
the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
that  fills  this  high  place  in  Senancour's 
affections.  He  pictures  to  himself  a 
primitive  life,  simple,  austere,  uniform  ; 
a  state  of  human  relationships  in  which 
friendship  such  as  the  ancients  knew  it 
—  the  friendship  of  Cicero  and  Atti- 
cus,  of  Laelius  and  Africanus  —  holds  a 
conspicuous  place.  By  nature  strong  in 
the  affections,  this  bond  of  two  minds 
and  souls,  united  in  thought,  feeling, 
and  belief,  the  "  absolute  running  of 
two  souls  into  one,"  as  Emerson  ex- 
presses it,  has  for  him  a  deep  attraction. 
He  realizes  what  Emerson  emphasizes 
with  greater  force  when  he  writes  that 
"  the  sweet  sincerity  of  joy  and  peace, 
which  I  draw  from  this  alliance  with 


INTRODUCTION  xxxvii 

my  brother's  soul,  is  the  nut  itself 
whereof  all  nature  and  all  thought  is 
but  the  husk  and  shell."  And  so  Se- 
nancour  writes  :  "  Peace  itself  is  a  sad 
blessing  when  there  is  no  hope  of  shar- 
ing it." 

Believing  firmly  in  the  inborn  good- 
ness of  humanity,  he  feels  that  the  dic- 
tates of  one's  own  nature  are  safe  guides 
to  be  followed  in  life,  "  convinced,"  he 
declares,  "  that  nothing  that  is  natural 
to  me  is  either  dangerous  or  to  be  con- 
demned." Yet  these  impulses  which  he 
acknowledges  as  wise  leaders  are  never 
to  be  other  than  moderate,  for,  he  says, 
"  dejection  follows  every  immoderate 
impulse."  And  the  goodness  which  he 
broadly  ascribes  to  all  human  nature 
is  far  from  being  of  a  commonplace 
order,  to  judge  from  his  own  definition  : 
"  True  goodness  requires  wide  concep- 
tions, a  great  soul,  and  restrained  pas- 
sions." Himself  a  man  of  restrained 
passions,  he  willingly  believes  that  all 


xxxviii  INTRODUCTION 

men  are  originally  made  virtuous,  and 
he  insists  upon  the  melancholy  degen- 
eration of  man  as  he  has  been  made  by 
the  "caprices  of  this  ephemeral  world." 
This  forms  the  keynote  of  his  aver- 
sion for  the  world,  and  the  reason  for 
his  appeal  to  nature  when,  overwhelmed 
with  despair  at  "  the  hopeless  tangle  of 
our  age,"  and  with  a  full  sense  of  his 
own  impotence,  he  seeks  solace  in  the 
strength  of  the  stars  and  the  peace  of 
the  solitary  hills.  For  nature  "  holds 
less  of  what  we  seek,  but  .  .  .  we  are 
surer  of  finding  the  things  that  she  con- 
tains." And  thus,  he  believes,  the  tie 
is  often  stronger  between  man  and  the 
"  friend  of  man  "  than  between  man 
and  man  ;  for  "  passion  goes  in  quest  of 
man,  but  reason  is  sometimes  obliged  to 
forsake  him  for  things  that  are  less  good 
and  less  fatal."  Alone,  battling  with  the 
"obstacles  and  the  dangers  of  rugged 
nature,  far  from  the  artificial  trammels 
and  the  ingenious  oppression  of  men," 


INTRODUCTION  xxxix 

he  feels  his  whole  being  broaden.  In 
Letter  VII,  from  Saint-Maurice,  he 
gives  a  vivid  description  of  one  of  his 
first  communings  with  the  "  friend  of 
man,"  after  he  has  fled  from  a  world 
which  oppressed  him,  and  against  which 
he  had  neither  the  courage  nor  the 
power  to  struggle  :  — 

"  On  those  desert  peaks,  where  the 
sky  is  measureless,  and  the  air  is  more 
stable,  and  time  less  fleeting,  and  life 
more  permanent,  —  there,  all  nature 
gives  eloquent  expression  to  a  vaster 
order,  a  more  visible  harmony,  an  eter- 
nal whole.  There,  man  is  reinstated  in 
his  changeful  but  indestructible  form; 
he  breathes  a  free  air  far  from  social 
emanations ;  ...  he  lives  a  life  of 
reality  in  the  midst  of  sublime  unity." 

In  this  very  year  Wordsworth  was 
writing  :  — 

"  To  her  fair  works  did  Nature  link 
The  human  soul  that  through  me  ran ; 
And  much  it  grieved  my  heart  to  think 
What  man  has  made  of  man." 


xl         INTRODUCTION 

We  can  now,  I  think,  understand  in 
a  measure  why  Senancour  has  remained 
obscure.  He  shunned  the  world,  and 
the  world  neglected  him  ;  he  could  not 
make  his  way  with  a  public  whom  he 
ignored  and  disliked.  Shrinking  from 
contact  with  men,  craving  neither  ap- 
plause nor  popularity,  despising  every 
means  of  obtaining  celebrity  that  savored 
of  intrigue  or  expedient,  he  marked  out 
for  himself  a  rigid  line  of  sincerity  and 
truth. 

"  If  it  is  not  sufficient,"  he  writes, 
"  to  say  things  that  are  true,  and  to 
strive  to  express  them  in  persuasive  lan- 
guage, I  shall  not  have  success." 

And  in  harmony  with  this  ideal  of 
literary  simplicity  and  directness  was  the 
feeling  he  had  that  an  author  should 
not  strive  to  receive  "  approbation  dur- 
ing his  lifetime."  The  only  success  he 
honored  and  desired  was  the  austere 
success  of  the  future  which  assigns  a 
work  "to  its  right  place."  Surely  this 


INTRODUCTION        xli 

was  not  the  temperament  from  which 
springs  the  desire  to  court  notoriety  or 
the  power  to  win  it. 

Another  reason  for  Senancour's  fail- 
ure to  reach  general  appreciation  is 
perhaps  his  unevenness.  Like  Words- 
worth, he  falls,  at  times,  far  below  his 
level ;  not  that  he  is  ever  weak,  but  in 
his  tendency  to  repetition  he  becomes 
tiresome.  Although  in  his  later  work 
he  shows  more  unity  and  a  clearer  sense 
of  proportion,  in  Obermann  he  is  want- 
ing in  what  is  necessary  to  the  creation 
of  a  complete  work  of  art,  the  power  to 
distinguish  between  the  essential  and  the 
non-essential.  It  is  this  power  which 
makes  Chateaubriand's  Rene  a  finished 
painting,  and  the  lack  of  this  power 
which  makes  Obermann  a  portfolio  of 
sketches  as  exquisite  as  Turner's  water- 
colors,  intermingled  with  minute  stud- 
ies of  unimportant  details. 

Obermann  has  been  compared  to 
Rene.  Both  books  describe  the  same 


xlii      INTRODUCTION 

order  of  psychologic  experience ;  they 
are  both  the  expression  of  thwarted 
lives,  of  unsatisfied  cravings.  But  there 
exists  this  difference  between  them : 
Rene  represents  passionate  struggle,  and 
later,  victory ;  Obermanny  despairing  ac- 
ceptance, and  later,  resignation.  With 
Rene,  nature  is  secondary  to  moral  pow- 
er ;  his  expression  is  strong,  brilliant, 
vigorous.  With  Obermann,  nature  is 
the  spring  of  all  beauty  and  perfection, 
she  is  mystic,  vast,  inscrutable ;  his  ex- 
pression has  something  of  the  sensitive, 
the  hidden  charm  which  he  has  caught 
from  the  inner  life  of  nature. 

We  know  that  Senancour  became 
familiar  with  the  works  of  his  great 
contemporary,  Chateaubriand,  and  that 
in  1816  he  published  a  critical  study 
of  the  Genie  du  Christianisme,  in  which 
he  exposed  with  merciless  candor  and 
logic  the  insincerity  of  Chateaubriand's 
religious  position.  But  at  the  time 
that  Senancour  wrote  Obermannt  while 


INTRODUCTION      xliii 

he  had  read  Atala,  as  he  himself  tells 
us,  Rene  and  the  Genie  du  Christianisme 
were  still  unknown  to  him.  Whatever 
similarity  existed  between  Obermann 
and  Rene  was  therefore  due  to  the 
spirit  that  animated  the  whole  literary 
movement  of  the  time,  to  the  roman- 
tic tendency  of  which  they  were  the 
simultaneous  expression. 

Another  parallel  that  suggests  itself 
is  with  Amiel ;  but  here,  too,  there  is  a 
marked  difference.  Senancour's  render- 
ing of  nature,  which  makes  him  worthy 
of  being  classed  among  the  poets,  is  on 
a  far  higher  plane  of  beauty  than  that 
of  Amiel,  while  he  is  greatly  Armel's 
inferior  in  strength  of  intellect,  cul- 
ture, and  mental  training.  It  is  Amiel's 
keenness  and  justness  as  a  critic  of  life 
and  things,  of  men  and  books,  that  give 
him  his  claim  to  distinction.  Senan- 
cour  is  a  poet  and  moralist,  Amiel  a 
critic  and  speculative  philosopher.  The 
difference  in  their  style  is  equally 


xliv      INTRODUCTION 

marked  :  Amiel  is  at  his  best  where  he 
is  incisive,  critical,  epigrammatic,  full 
of  verve,  cutting  to  the  root  of  his  sub- 
ject like  fine  steel ;  Senancour,  where 
he  is  poetical  and  meditative.  The 
philosophy  of  Amiel  is  on  a  far  more 
intricate  scale  and  takes  a  more  promi- 
nent place  in  his  'Journal  than  does  that 
of  Senancour  in  Qbermann;  but  the  idea 
of  the  indefinite,  miscalled  the  infinite, 
appeals  equally  to  both,  though  in  dif- 
ferent ways.  Amiel  is  fascinated  by  it, 
—  his  individual  life  is  absorbed,  evap- 
orated, lost,  in  the  universal  nothing ; 
while  Senancour,  alone,  as  an  individual, 
stands  face  to  face  with  an  immutable 
and  inscrutable  eternity,  which  terrifies 
and  overwhelms  him,  but  which  he 
desires  to  comprehend  through  an 
etherealized  intelligence.  The  com- 
mon ground  on  which  they  meet  is 
their  desire  to  be  in  unison  with  the 
life  of  nature,  their  mystical  pantheism, 
and  their  morbid  melancholia  which 


INTRODUCTION       xlv 

leads  them  into  pessimism,  —  all  of 
these  traits  being  an  inheritance  from 
their  great  progenitor,  Rousseau.  It 
was  the  malady  of  the  century,  — 
"  melancholy,  languor,  lassitude,  dis- 
couragement," as  we  find  in  Amiel's 
Journal,  —  lack  of  will  power,  the 
capacity  to  suffer,  a  minute  psychologic 
analysis,  the  turning  of  life  into  a  dream 
without  production,  that  formed  the 
basis  of  their  affinity. 

We  must,  in  fact,  go  back  to  the 
ideas  that  formed  the  spring  of  the 
Revolutionary  movement  and  changed 
the  conditions  of  modern  society,  to 
find  the  common  meeting-ground  of 
all  the  romanticists.  Unswerving  belief 
in  human  nature,  desire  for  the  simpli- 
fication of  life  and  dislike  of  the  com- 
plicated social  conditions  of  the  old 
order,  passionate  love  of  the  natural 
world,  full  return  to  nature  as  the  ideal 
of  life,  glorification  of  savage  man,  — 
these  ideas,  formulated  by  Rousseau, 


xlvi      INTRODUCTION 

were  the  inspiration  of  Chateaubriand, 
Senancour,  and  Amiel.  Rousseau,  as 
the  father  of  the  movement,  became 
the  chief  influence  in  the  work  of  his 
successors :  he  set  the  type  for  their 
beliefs ;  he  opened  the  path  through 
which  all  were  to  walk,  —  some  as 
leaders,  like  Chateaubriand,  others  as 
recluses,  like  Senancour  ;  his  spirit  per- 
vaded not  only  France,  but  Europe  ; 
from  him  proceeded  Childe  Harold, 
Werther,  and  Rene,  as  well  as  Obermann. 
The  poet  with  whom  Senancour  has 
most  of  kinship  in  mood,  in  feeling,  in 
charm  of  expression,  is  Matthew  Ar- 
nold. That  Obermann  exerted  a  strong 
influence  over  Matthew  Arnold's  early 
years  is  clear  from  several  references  in 
both  of  the  Obermann  poems.  "  We 
feel  thy  spell !  "  the  English  poet  cries, 
and  that  spell  draws  him  to  solitude,  to 
sad  reverie,  to  companionship  with  the 
eremite,  the  "  master  of  my  wandering 
youth,"  the  name  he  gives,  many  years 


INTRODUCTION     xlvii 

later,  to  Obermann.  But  stronger  still 
than  this  inclination  is  the  opposite 
impulsion,  the  necessity  which  is  upon 
him  to  go  out  into  the  strife  of  men, 
—  an  unseen  driving  power  which  he 
calls  fate,  but  which  we  might  call  con- 
science. And  so  he  cries :  — 

" 1  go,  fate  drives  me ;  but  I  leave 
Half  of  my  life  with  you." 

Yet  with  him  he  carries  into  the  world 
that  thing  which 

"  has  been  lent 
To  youth  and  age  in  common  discontent," 

and  the 

"  infinite  desire 
For  all  that  might  have  been," 

and 

"  The  eternal  note  of  sadness." 

It  is  the  poet  in  Matthew  Arnold 
that  claims  "  fellowship  of  mood  "  and 
sympathy  with  the  poet  in  Senancour. 
This  may  explain  why  Matthew  Arnold 
has  not  given  of  him  one  of  his  delight- 
ful critical  portraits.  The  affinity  is  too 


xlviii     INTRODUCTION 

close,  the  influence  too  subtle,  to  be 
brought  within  the  limits  of  analysis. 
But  beyond  this  personal  affinity  of 
mood,  Matthew  Arnold  reveres  Ober- 
mann  as  a  sage  and  seer.  Every  one 
will  recall  those  verses,  in  the  first 
Obermann  poem,  beginning :  — 

"  Yet,  of  the  spirits  who  have  reigned 
In  this  our  troubled  day, 
I  know  but  two,  who  have  attained, 
Save  thee,  to  see  their  way." 

These  two  spirits  are  Wordsworth 
and  Goethe. 

Twenty  years  later  he  returns  to 
"  Obermann  once  more,'*  and  in  a  vi- 
sion is  charged  by  the  ancient  sage  to 
carry  to  the  world  the  message  of  that 
hope  for  which  Senancour  had  so  pas- 
sionately longed.  Obermann,  addressing 
the  younger  poet,  urges  him  to  tell,  — 

"  Hope  to  a  world  new-made  ! 
Help  it  to  fill  that  deep  desire, 
The  want  which  crazed  our  brain, 
Consumed  our  soul  with  thirst  like  fire, 
Immedicable  pain." 


INTRODUCTION      xlix 

Matthew  Arnold  here  constitutes 
himself  the  disciple  and  exponent  of 
Obermann,  the  interpreter  of  his  aspi- 
rations, and  the  complement,  as  it  were, 
of  his  unfulfilled  and  disappointed  life. 

The  fellowship  of  Matthew  Arnold 
with  Obermann  is  seen  in  several  of  his 
poems,  in  The  Grande  Chartreuse,  The 
Youth  of  Nature,  The  Touth  of  Man,  and 
markedly  in  Self-Dependence. 

Indirectly  it  is  also  apparent  in  many 
modes  of  thought  and  feeling.  In  both 
poets  there  is  a  ground  tone  of  melan- 
choly underlying  the  passionate  craving 
for  tranquillity  and  joy,  which  leaves 
them  forever  reaching  out  toward  a 
goal  that  can  never  be  attained.  To- 
gether with  this  is  the  sense  of  the 
futility  of  human  effort,  and  a  blind  re- 
liance on  fate.  Both  are  stoical  in  their 
austerity,  and  both  are  transcendental 
in  their  tendencies.  In  both  we  find  a 
deep  discontent  with  "  the  thousand 
discords,"  and  the  "  vain  turmoil "  of 


1  INTRODUCTION 

the  world  ;  a  desire  to  be  in  sympathy 
and  union  with  the  inner  life  of  the 
universe ;  to 

"  Yearn  to  the  greatness  of  Nature  ;  " 

and  the  final  appeal  to  nature,  whose 
glory  and  greatness  and  calm  are  alone 
enduring,  while  all  else  is  subject  to 
change,  —  a  nature  who  can  say  of  men 
in  Matthew  Arnold's  words :  — 

"  They  are  dust,  they  are  changed,  they  are  gone ! 
I  remain." 

And  how  like  Senancour  is  the  spirit 
of  these  lines  :  — 

"  For  the  world,  which  seems 
To  lie  before  us  like  a  land  of  dreams, 
So  various,  so  beautiful,  so  new, 
Hath  really  neither  joy,  nor  love,  nor  light, 
Nor  certitude,  nor  peace,  nor  help  for  pain." 

But  this  resemblance,  strong  as  it  is 
in  many  ways,  belongs  more  to  their 
moods,  their  ethical  attitude  toward 
life,  the  peculiar  temper  of  their  minds, 
than  to  character,  or  intellect,  or  crea- 
tive power.  As  a  result  of  this  affinity 


INTRODUCTION         li 

of  sentiment  is  a  certain  similarity  in 
rhythm,  the  outward  but  elusive  ex- 
pression of  the  inner  feeling.  In  both 
writers  we  find  the  same  note  of  sad- 
ness in  the  cadence,  the  same  grace  and 
charm  of  diction,  the  same  dying  fall 
at  the  end  of  the  sentence,  like  the  ebb 
and  flow  of  the  waves  on  the  shore. 
Especially  is  this  evident  in  The  Touth 
of  Man,  The  Touth  of  Nature,  parts  of 
Tristram  and  Iseult,  and  Dover  Beach. 
There  exists  this  difference  between 
them :  in  Senancour  the  expression  is 
spontaneous  and  natural ;  in  Matthew 
Arnold  it  is  finished,  and  the  result  of 
art  and  study. 

Senancour's  inward  changes  during 
the  twenty  -  five  years  that  followed 
the  appearance  of  his  first  work,  the 
Reveries,  were  great;  they  formed  a 
gradual  and  continuous  growth,  from 
despair  to  resignation,  from  restlessness 
to  calm,  from  doubt  to  belief,  from  ma- 
terialism through  pantheism  to  theism. 


lii         INTRODUCTION 

Throughout  Obermann  we  see  traces  of 
a  passionate  longing  for  more  than  na- 
ture could  give  him,  something  higher 
than  nature.  On  the  lyth  of  August, 
in  Letter  XVIII,  from  Fontainebleau, 
he  writes :  — 

"  I  am  filled  with  an  unrest  that  will 
never  leave  me  ;  it  is  a  craving  I  do  not 
comprehend,  which  overrules  me,  ab- 
sorbs me,  lifts  me  above  the  things  that 
perish.  .  .  .  You  are  mistaken,  and  I 
too  was  once  mistaken ;  it  is  not  the 
desire  for  love.  A  great  distance  lies 
between  the  void  that  fills  my  heart  and 
the  love  that  I  have  so  deeply  desired ; 
but  the  infinite  stretches  between  what 
I  am  and  what  I  crave  to  be.  Love  is 
vast,  but  it  is  not  the  infinite.  I  do  not 
desire  enjoyment ;  I  long  for  hope,  I 
crave  knowledge  !  .  .  .  I  desire  a  good, 
a  dream,  a  hope,  that  shall  be  ever 
before  me,  beyond  me,  greater  even 
than  my  expectation,  greater  than  what 
passes  away.'* 


INTRODUCTION        liii 

At  the  time  he  wrote  these  words, 
he  had  no  belief  in  the  immortality  of 
the  soul,  no  hope  beyond  this  world. 
Later,  this  belief  and  this  hope  were  to 
come  to  him ;  but  even  then  he  had 
glimpses  of  the  future  peace,  as  when 
he  writes,  in  Letter  XIX,  on  the  i8th 
of  August :  — 

"There  are  moments  when  I  am 
filled  with  hope  and  a  sense  of  liberty  ; 
time  and  things  pass  before  me  with 
majestic  harmony,and  I  feel  happy.  .  .  . 
Happy  !  I  ?  And  yet  I  am,  and  happy 
to  overflowing,  like  one  who  reawakens 
from  the  terrors  of  a  dream  to  a  life  of 
peace  and  liberty.  .  .  .  But  the  moment 
passes  ;  a  cloud  drifts  across  the  sun  and 
shuts  out  its  inspiring  light ;  the  birds 
are  hushed  ;  the  growing  darkness  drives 
away  both  my  dream  and  my  joy." 

The  time  was  to  come  when  this  life 
of  "  peace  and  liberty  "  would  no  longer 
be  seen  by  snatches,  between  the  drift- 
ing clouds,  but  would  fill  him  with  the 


liv        INTRODUCTION 

serenity  he  so  ardently  craved.  Perhaps 
he  little  dreamed  that  his  prayer,  framed 
as  a  question,  was  to  be  answered  in  his 
life  with  the  same  beauty  that  he  pic- 
tured it  in  words.  In  Letter  XXIII, 
dated  on  the  i8th  of  October  from 
Fontainebleau,  we  find  this  passage  :  — 

"  Will  it  also  be  given  unto  man  to 
know  the  long  peace  of  autumn  after 
the  unrest  of  the  strength  of  his  years, 
even  as  the  fire,  after  its  haste  to  be  con- 
sumed, lingers  before  it  is  quenched  ? 

"  Long  before  the  equinox,  the  leaves 
had  fallen  in  quantities,  yet  the  forest 
still  holds  much  of  its  verdure  and  all 
of  its  beauty.  More  than  forty  days  ago 
everything  looked  as  though  it  would 
end  before  its  time,  and  now  all  things 
are  enduring  beyond  their  allotted  days ; 
receiving,  at  the  very  door  of  destruc- 
tion, a  lengthened  life,  which  lingers  on 
the  threshold  of  its  decay  with  abundant 
grace  or  security,  and  seems  to  borrow, 
as  it  weakens  with  gentle  loitering,  both 


INTRODUCTION         Iv 

from  the  repose  of  approaching  death 
and  from  the  charm  of  departing  life." 
This  we  may  take  as  a  picture  of  his 
own  old  age.  Not  that  his  material  sur- 
roundings had  in  any  way  improved ; 
the  change  was  internal,  and  was  the  ful- 
fillment of  his  own  words  :  "  The  true 
life  of  man  is  within  himself;  what  he 
absorbs  from  the  outside  world  is  merely 
accidental  and  subordinate."  The  fruit 
of  this  change  came  to  maturity  in  his 
last  important  work,  Libres  Meditations, 
written  fifteen  years  after  Obermann. 
In  the  writer  of  the  Meditations  we  see 
a  man  who  has  profoundly  suffered,  and 
whose  spirit  has  been  softened,  chas- 
tened, harmonized.  His  last  word  to  the 
world  is  the  calm,  majestic  expression 
of  one  who  has  realized  the  existence 
of  a  distant  truth,  and  has  succeeded  in 
lessening  the  space  which  separated  him 
from  it.  It  is  the  answer  to  the  restless 
questionings,  the  doubt  of  Obermann. 
Even  in  Obermann  he  had  begun  to  feel 


Ivi        INTRODUCTION 

that  nature  was  not  the  beginning  and 
the  end  of  all  things.  On  a  day  in  Au- 
gust, in  Letter  XVI,  he  writes  from 
Fontainebleau :  — 

"  What  noble  sentiments  !  What 
memories !  What  quiet  majesty  in  a 
night,  soft,  calm,  luminous !  What 
grandeur !  But  the  soul  is  overwhelmed 
with  doubt.  It  sees  that  the  feelings 
aroused  by  sentient  things  lead  it  into 
error ;  that  truth  exists,  but  in  the  far 
distance." 

In  the  Meditations  the  pursuit  of  this 
distant  truth  has  led  him  to  belief  in 
a  God,  in  a  future  life,  in  a  governing 
power  in  the  universe ;  nature  is  the 
proof  of  divine  wisdom  ;  the  world  we 
live  in,  and  the  world  to  which  we  are 
pressing  forward,  are  the  results  of  di- 
vine justice.  The  Meditations  is  a  work 
of  distinct  ethical  value  ;  its  writer  a 
moralist  of  the  type  of  Marcus  Aure- 
lius.  The  classic  dignity  and  repose  of 
its  style,  its  full  and  measured  numbers, 


INTRODUCTION        Ivii 

like  the  solemn  harmonies  of  church 
music,  are  the  perfect  outward  expres- 
sion of  elevation  of  thought,  a  poised 
nature,  a  spirit  of  peace  and  consola- 
tion. We  are  lifted  above  the  strife  of 
the  world  to  a  region  of  moral  grandeur. 
The  poet  is  lost  in  the  seer. 

This  change,  although  so  fundamen- 
tal, is  not  a  mark  of  inconsistency.  The 
youth  of  nineteen  who  ran  away  from 
home  to  avoid  acting  a  part  is  still  the 
man  of  maturity  who  wrote  the  Medi- 
tations ;  genuineness,  simplicity,  and  the 
love  of  truth  form  the  basis  of  his  na- 
ture. 

Senancour  lived  twenty-seven  years 
after  writing  the  Meditations,  and  the 
spirit  of  calm  continued  to  grow  upon 
him  ;  yet  his  external  life  can  scarcely 
have  held  more  of  happiness  in  his  old 
age  than  it  had  in  his  youth.  He  had 
left  Switzerland  many  years  before,  soon 
after  the  completion  of  Obermanny  and 
had  returned  to  Paris,  where,  poor  and 


Iviii      INTRODUCTION 

almost  in  want,  he  lived  a  secluded  life, 
with  his  daughter  as  his  only  companion, 
in  a  house  near  the  Place  de  la  Bastile, 
on  the  Rue  de  la  Cerisaie,  a  street  of 
interesting  historic  memories  connected 
with  Charles  VI  and  Francis  I.  There, 
a  recluse  in  the  midst  of  the  world,  he 
composed  his  Meditations,  and  there, 
obliged  to  live  by  his  pen,  the  only  way 
open  to  him,  he  wrote  for  the  periodi- 
cals and  journals  of  Paris,  edited  ency- 
clopaedias, prepared  historical  summa- 
ries, and  spent  years  in  the  drudgery  of 
the  literary  profession.  In  1846,  four 
years  before  the  death  of  Wordsworth, 
at  the  age  of  seventy-six,  he  died  at  St. 
Cloud,  a  lonely  old  man. 


OBERMANN 


LETTERS 

TO    A 

FRIEND 


LETTER    I 

Geneva,  July  8th,  ist year* 

&  &  &  $  $OT  more  than  ten  days  have 
TVT     *  passed  since  I  wrote  to  you 
from  Lyons.  I  did  not  men- 
tion  any  new  project:  I  had 

J  J.          J 

none ;  and  now  I  have  left  everything 
behind,  I  am  in  a  strange  land.   .  .   . 

Even  at  this  moment  I  am  at  a  loss 
to  judge  of  a  resolution  which  has  swept 
away  all  former  plans,3  which  carries 
me  abruptly  into  new  surroundings, 
which  destines  me  for  things  I  had  not 
anticipated,  the  developments  and  con- 
sequences of  which  I  cannot  even  fore- 


4          OBERMANN 

see.  ...  A  narrow  and  timorous  pru- 
dence in  those  on  whom  fate  made  me 
dependent,  wasted  my  early  years,  and 
has  fettered  my  entire  life.  Wisdom 
treads  between  diffidence  and  temerity  ; 
the  path  is  difficult.  We  must  follow 
her  in  ways  that  she  can  see ;  but  in 
ways  unknown,  instinct  is  our  only 
guide.  Though  instinct  may  be  more 
dangerous  than  prudence,  it  accom- 
plishes greater  things.  It  is  our  ruin,  or 
our  salvation  ;  its  temerity  becomes  at 
times  our  only  refuge,  and  its  mission 
may  be  to  redress  the  wrongs  that  pru- 
dence has  wrought. 

The  yoke  must  either  have  weighed 
me  down  irrevocably  or  have  been 
shaken  off  without  heed ;  the  alterna- 
tive seemed  inevitable.  You  well  know 
what  a  wretched  chain  was  being 
forged.  I  was  to  do  what  it  was  impos- 
sible for  me  to  do  well.  I  was  to  fill  a 
position  for  its  emoluments,  use  the 
faculties  of  my  being  for  what  essen- 


OBERMANN          5 

tially  shocked  its  nature.  Was  it  my 
duty  to  yield  in  momentary  compliance, 
to  deceive  a  parent  into  thinking  that 
I  was  undertaking  for  my  entire  life 
what  I  should  have  begun  merely  with 
the  longing  that  it  might  end,  and  thus 
live  in  a  false  position,  in  a  state  of  con- 
tinual antipathy  ?  May  he  recognize 
my  powerlessness  to  satisfy  him,  may  he 
forgive  me !  May  he  come  to  feel  .  .  . 
that  a  profession  cannot  be  looked  upon 
as  honest,  simply  because  one  can  earn 
an  income  of  thirty  or  forty  thousand 
francs  without  theft ;  and  that  I  could 
not  sacrifice  my  manhood,  in  order  to 
become  a  man  of  affairs. 

I  do  not  seek  to  persuade  you,  I  re- 
call facts ;  you  are  the  judge.  A  friend 
must  judge  without  too  great  leniency, 
as  you  have  said.  .  .  . 

I  searched  my  heart ;  I  passed  rapidly 
in  review  all  my  surroundings.  From 
men,  I  strove  to  learn  whether  they  felt 
as  I  did ;  from  things,  whether  they 


6          OBERMANN 

were  in  accord  with  my  inclinations ; 
and  I  saw  that  I  was  out  of  harmony 
with  society,  that  my  needs  were  not 
in  touch  with  its  handiwork.  I  checked 
myself  with  terror,  feeling  that  I  was 
on  the  verge  of  giving  up  my  life  to  in- 
tolerable weariness,  to  a  loathing  with- 
out aim  and  without  end.  To  my  heart 
I  offered  in  succession  all  things  sought 
by  men  in  the  various  professions  which 
they  elect.  I  even  strove  to  adorn, 
through  the  magic  of  the  imagination, 
those  complex  aims  which  they  hold 
up  to  their  passions,  and  the  chimeric 
end  to  which  they  devote  their  years. 
I  attempted  it,  but  in  vain.  Why  is 
the  earth  thus  disenchanted  to  my  eyes  ? 
It  is  not  satiety  that  I  feel ;  on  all  sides 
I  find  a  void. 

On  that  day  when,  for  the  first  time, 
I  felt  the  nothingness  which  surrounds 
me,  on  that  day  which  changed  the 
course  of  my  life,  had  the  pages  of  my 
destiny  lain  in  my  hands  to  be  forever 


OBERMANN          7 

opened  or  closed,  with  what  indiffer- 
ence would  I  have  renounced  the  empty 
succession  of  hours,  so  long  yet  so  fleet- 
ing, which  such  bitterness  has  sullied, 
and  which  no  true  joy  can  console  ! 
You  know  that  it  is  my  misfortune  not 
to  have  the  capacity  to  be  young ;  the 
long  weariness  of  my  early  life  has 
apparently  destroyed  the  seductions  of 
youth.  Its  blooming  exterior  does  not 
deceive  me ;  my  half-closed  eyes  are 
never  dazzled ;  too  steady,  they  are  not 
taken  by  surprise. 

That  day  of  irresolution  was  at  least 
a  day  of  light ;  it  made  me  see  things 
within,  which  before  had  not  been 
clear.  Plunged  in  the  deepest  perplex- 
ity of  my  life,  I  had  for  the  first  time 
a  full  consciousness  of  my  being.  Pur- 
sued even  to  the  melancholy  calm  of 
my  usual  apathy,  forced  to  be  some- 
thing, I  was  at  last  myself;  and  in  these 
emotions,  hitherto  unfelt,  I  found  an 
energy,  at  first  constrained  and  painful, 


8  OBERMANN 

but  the  fullness  of  which  grew  to  be  a 
repose  that  was  new  to  me.  Out  of  this 
condition,  so  unexpected  and  so  full  of 
peace,  my  determining  thought  took 
shape ;  and  I  saw,  as  I  believed,  the 
reason  for  what  we  observe  every  day, 
that  the  actual  differences  in  the  lot  of 
man  are  not  the  principal  cause  of  his 
happiness  or  his  misery. 

The  true  life  of  man  is  within  him- 
self; what  he  absorbs  from  the  out- 
side world  is  merely  accidental  and 
subordinate.  Things  influence  him  far 
more  through  the  situation  in  which 
they  find  him  than  through  their  own 
nature.  Were  he  to  be  continually 
moulded  by  them  throughout  the 
whole  course  of  his  life,  he  might  be- 
come their  creature.  But  in  this  ever- 
moving  sequence,  he  alone  subsists, 
though  altered,  while  external  objects 
related  to  him  are  wholly  changed ; 
thus,  each  of  their  impressions  upon 
him  depends  far  more,  for  his  happi- 


OBERMANN          9 

ness  or  his  misery,  upon  the  condition 
in  which  they  find  him,  than  upon  the 
sensation  they  produce  or  the  accidental 
change  in  him  they  cause.  Thus,  in 
each  separate  moment  of  his  life,  to  be 
what  he  ought  to  be,  is  of  the  highest 
importance  to  man. 

#  #    # 

As  soon  as  man  reflects,  as  soon  as  he 
is  not  carried  away  by  his  first  impulse, 
and  by  the  unconscious  laws  of  instinct, 
all  morality  becomes,  in  a  sense,  a  mat- 
ter of  calculation,  and  prudence  lies  in 
the  estimate  of  the  more  or  the  less. 

•  •   • 

Independent  of  the  world,  and  in  the 
silence  of  the  passions,  we  can  study 
ourselves.  I  shall  choose  a  retreat  in  the 
calm  of  those  heights  which  even  in 
childhood  left  an  impression  on  my 
mind. 


io        O  B  E  R  M  AN  N 


LETTER  II 

Lausanne ',  July  ythy  1st  year. 

YOU  have  not  seen  this  land, neither 
can  you  picture  it  to  yourself; 
the  imagination  is  powerless  to  draw, 
in  their  true  lines,  the  grand  effects  of 
nature.  Had  I  felt  less  deeply  the 
grandeur  and  harmony  of  the  scene 
as  a  whole,  had  not  the  purity  of 
the  atmosphere  added  a  quality  beyond 
the  power  of  words  to  express,  were  I 
different  from  what  I  am.  I  should 
strive  to  picture  to  you  these  snow-clad 
and  resplendent  heights ;  these  valleys 
flooded  with  mist ;  the  steep,  black 
cliffs  of  Savoy ;  the  hills  of  La  Vaux 
and  the  Jorat,  too  verdant,  perhaps,  but 
crowned  by  the  Alps  of  Gruyeres  and 
Ormont ;  and  the  wide  waters  of  Lake 
Leman,  the  sweep  of  its  waves,  and  its 
measured  peace.  Perhaps  the  secret 


OBERMANN        n 

emotions  of  my  heart  added  to  the 
magic  of  these  scenes ;  perhaps  no  man, 
at  sight  of  them,  has  felt  all  that  I  have 
felt.  .  .  . 

I  should  be  loath  to  believe  that  a 
man  whose  heart  has  been  wounded  by 
familiarity  with  sorrow,  has  not,  by  his 
very  suffering,  been  given  the  power 
to  enjoy  delights  unknown  to  the 
happy — joys  that  are  broader  and  more 
lasting  than  theirs,  and  of  a  nature  to 
sustain  old  age  itself.  As  for  myself, 
I  realized  at  that  moment,  when  no- 
thing was  wanting  but  another  heart 
to  feel  as  I  felt,  that  a  single  hour  of 
one's  life  may  be  worth  a  whole  year 
of  existence,  that  everything  is  relative 
within  us  and  without  us,  and  that  our 
troubles  come  chiefly  from  our  being 
out  of  place  in  the  social  order.  .  .  . 

I  was  under  the  pines  of  the  Jorat ; 
the  evening  was  beautiful,  the  woods 
silent,  the  air  calm,  the  sunset  misty, 
but  cloudless.  Everything  seemed  sta- 


12        OBERMANN 

tionary,  illumined,  motionless ;  then, 
suddenly,  as  I  raised  my  eyes,  long  fixed 
upon  the  moss  where  I  was  sitting, 
there  came  to  me  an  impressive  illusion, 
which  the  mood  of  reverie  that  I  was 
in  helped  to  prolong.  The  steep  slope 
that  reached  down  to  the  lake  was  hid- 
den by  the  knoll  on  which  I  sat ;  and 
the  surface  of  the  lake,  seeming  to  rise 
as  it  receded  into  distance,  lifted  the 
opposite  shore  into  the  air.  The  Alps 
of  Savoy  were  half  veiled  by  the  mist, 
and  all  were  blended  and  merged  into 
the  same  shades.  The  light  of  the  sun- 
set and  the  haze  of  the  air  in  the  depths 
of  the  Valais  uplifted  the  mountains 
and  divided  them  from  the  earth,  by 
making  their  lower  slopes  invisible ; 
and  their  colossal  bodies,  without  form, 
without  color,  sombre  and  snowy,  illu- 
mined yet  shadowy,  had  the  appearance 
of  a  mass  of  storm  clouds  suspended  in 
space  :  there  was  no  earth  save  that 
which  held  me  above  the  void,  alone 
in  immensity. 


OBERMANN  13 

That  moment   was  worthy  of  the 
first  day  in  a  new  life.   .  .  . 


LETTER    III 

Cully*  July  nth,  1st  year. 

THE  storm  has  passed,  the  even- 
.  ing  is  beautiful.  My  windows 
open  on  the  lake ;  the  white  spray  of 
the  waves  is  tossed,  now  and  again,  into 
my  room;  it  has  even  bathed  the  roof. 
The  wind  blows  from  the  southwest, 
and  it  is  at  this  point  that  the  waves 
sweep  to  their  full  height  and  strength. 
This  movement  and  these  measured 
sounds  give  to  the  soul  a  powerful  im- 
petus. Were  it  my  lot  to  go  beyond 
the  bounds  of  ordinary  life,  were  it 
given  me  to  truly  live,  yet  were  I 
weighed  down  with  discouragement,  I 
should  wish  to  stand  alone  for  a  little 
while  on  the  shores  of  a  wave-tossed 
lake ;  I  believe  there  would  then  be 


14        OBERMANN 

no  deeds   so    great  but   that    I  could 
accomplish  them.  .   .  . 

I  write  you  even  as  I  should  talk,  as 
one  talks  to  one's  self.  At  times  there 
is  nothing  to  say,  yet  one  still  feels  the 
need  of  talking ;  that  is  often  the  mo- 
ment when  one  rambles  on  with  the 
greatest  ease.  The  only  kind  of  walk 
that  gives  real  pleasure  is  when  we 
wander  without  aim,  solely  for  the  love 
of  walking,  looking  for  something,  we 
know  not  what ;  when  the  air  is  still, 
the  sky  gray,  and  we  are  free  from 
care,  indifferent  to  time,  and  plunge  at 
random  through  the  gullies  and  into  the 
woods  of  an  unknown  region  ;  when 
we  talk  of  mushrooms,  of  roes,  of  the 
red  leaves  as  they  begin  to  fall ;  when 
I  say  to  you  :  "  This  is  a  spot  like  the 
one  where  my  father  lingered,  ten  years 
ago,  to  play  at  quoits  with  me,  and 
where  he  left  his  hanger,  which,  the 
next  day,  could  not  be  found;"  when 
you  say  to  me :  "  The  place  where  we 


OBERMANN         15 

have  just  crossed  the  stream  would 
have  delighted  my  father.  During  the 
last  days  of  his  life  he  was  frequently 
driven  a  long  distance  from  the  city  to 
a  dense  wood,  where  there  were  rocks 
and  water ;  then  he  left  the  carriage, 
and  sometimes  alone,  sometimes  with 
me,  he  sat  on  one  of  the  rocks ;  we 
read  together  the  Vies  des  Plres  du  de- 
sert 5  He  would  say  to  me :  '  If  in  my 
youth  I  had  entered  a  monastery,  in 
answer  to  the  call  of  God,  I  should  not 
have  suffered  all  the  affliction  that  has 
fallen  to  my  lot  in  the  world,  I  should 
not  to-day  be  so  infirm  and  so  broken  ; 
but  I  should  have  had  no  son,  and,  in 
dying,  I  should  leave  nothing  upon  the 
earth.'  "  .  .  .  And  now  he  is  no  longer 
here  !  They  are  not  here  !  .  .  . 

When  we  used  to  lose  ourselves  in 
the  woods  of  the  Forez,  we  wandered 
freely  and  at  random.  A  strange  so- 
lemnity would  hover  over  the  memo- 
ries of  a  time  long  since  passed  away, 


16        OBERMANN 

which  seemed  to  come  back  to  us  in  the 
depths  and  the  majesty  of  the  woods. 
How  it  enlarges  the  soul  to  meet  with 
things  beautiful,  yet  unforeseen  !  Those 
things  which  are  the  province  of  the 
soul  ought  not,  I  think,  to  be  fore- 
known and  ordered ;  let  us  leave  it  to 
the  mind  to  study  by  rule,  and  to  bring 
symmetry  into  its  work.  But  the  heart 
does  not  work,  and  if  you  call  upon  it 
to  produce,  it  will  produce  nothing ; 
cultivation  makes  it  sterile. 


LETTER  IV 


ly  July  igth,  1st  year. 

MY  window  was  open  at  night. 
Towards  four  o'clock  I  was 
awakened  by  the  splendor  of  the  dawn, 
and  the  scent  of  the  new-mown  hay, 
cut  in  the  fresh  night  air,  by  the  light 
of  the  moon.  I  looked  for  an  ordinary 
view  ;  I  was  given  a  moment  of  won- 


OBERMANN        17 

der.  The  waters,  which  had  already 
risen  by  the  melting  of  the  Jura  snows, 
were  kept  at  their  full  by  the  rains 
of  the  summer  solstice.  The  plain  be- 
tween the  lake6  and  the  Thiele7  was 
flooded  in  parts ;  the  highest  levels 
formed  lonely  pastures,  rising  out  of 
the  midst  of  the  fields  of  water  ruffled 
by  the  fresh  winds  of  the  morning. 
The  waves  of  the  lake  were  driven 
afar  by  the  wind,  over  the  half-sub- 
merged shore.  At  that  moment  some 
cows  and  goats,  and  the  goatherd  play- 
ing a  wild  melody  on  his  horn,  passed 
over  a  dry  strip  of  land  between  the 
flooded  plain  and  the  Thiele.  A  few 
stones,  thrown  here  and  there  into  the 
deepest  places,  supported  and  length- 
ened out  this  natural  causeway ;  the 
pasture,  to  which  these  docile  creatures 
were  on  their  way,  was  out  of  sight ; 
and  to  watch  their  slow  and  uncertain 
gait,  it  seemed  as  though  they  would 
step  into  the  lake  and  be  lost.  The 


i8        OBERMANN 

heights  of  Anet,  and  the  deep  forests 
of  the  Jolimont,  rose  out  of  the  heart 
of  the  waters,  like  a  wild  and  unin- 
habited island.  The  hilly  chain  of  the 
Vuilly  bordered  the  lake  on  the  ho- 
rizon. Towards  the  south,  it  stretched 
its  length  behind  the  slopes  of  Mont- 
rnirail ;  and  beyond  all,  sixty  leagues  of 
a  century's  ice  gave  to  the  whole  coun- 
try that  inimitable  majesty  by  which 
nature  with  her  boldest  strokes  makes 
earth  sublime.  .  .  . 

In  the  evening,  before  the  rising  of 
the  moon,  I  walked  beside  the  green 
waters  of  the  Thiele.  Feeling  inclined 
to  dream,  and  finding  the  air  so  soft 
that  I  could  pass  the  whole  night  in 
the  open,  I  followed  the  road  to  Saint- 
Blaise.  At  the  small  village  of  Marin, 
I  turned  aside  to  the  lake  at  the 
south,  and  descended  a  steep  bank  to 
the  shore,  where  the  waves  came  to  die 
on  the  sands.  The  air  was  calm,  not  a 
sail  could  be  seen  on  the  lake.  All  were 


OBERMANN         19 

at  rest,  some  in  the  forgetfulness  of  toil, 
others  in  the  oblivion  of  sorrow.  The 
moon  rose ;  I  lingered  long.  Towards 
morning  she  spread  over  the  earth  and 
the  waters  the  ineffable  melancholy  of 
her  last  rays.  Nature  appears  immea- 
surably grand  when,  lost  in  reverie,  one 
hears  the  rippling  of  the  waves  upon 
the  solitary  shore,  in  the  calm  of  a  night 
still  resplendent  and  illumined  by  the 
setting  moon. 

Ineffable  sensibility,  charm  and  tor- 
ment of  our  fruitless  years,  profound 
realization  of  a  nature  everywhere  over- 
whelming and  everywhere  inscrutable, 
all-absorbing  passion,  deepened  wisdom, 
rapturous  self-abandonment,  —  all  that 
a  human  soul  can  experience  of  deep  de- 
sire and  world-weariness,  —  I  felt  it  all, 
I  lived  it  all  on  that  memorable  night. 
I  have  taken  a  fatal  step  towards  the 
age  of  decay ;  I  have  consumed  ten 
years  of  my  life.  Happy  the  simple 
man  whose  heart  is  always  young ! 


20        OBERMANN 

There,  in  the  peace  of  the  night,  I 
questioned  my  uncertain  destiny,  my 
restless  heart,  and  that  incomprehensi- 
ble nature  which,  containing  all  things, 
seems  yet  not  to  hold  the  object  of  my 
desires.  What  am  I,  then  ?  I  asked 
myself.  What  melancholy  mixture  of 
all-embracing  affection  and  of  indiffer- 
ence towards  every  aim  of  actual  life  ? 

Always  seeking  what  I  shall  never 
find,  an  alien  in  the  midst  of  nature, 
out  of  place  among  men,  empty  af- 
fections will  alone  be  my  lot ;  and 
whether  I  live  unto  myself,  or  whether 
I  live  unto  men,  I  shall  suffer  either 
oppression  from  without  or  restraint 
from  within — nothing  but  the  perpet- 
ual torment  of  a  life  forever  repressed 
and  forever  miserable.  .  .  . 

It  is  true  I  love  only  nature ;  but  for 
this  very  reason,  while  I  love  myself,  I 
do  not  love  myself  exclusively,  and 
other  men  are  still  the  part  of  nature 
that  I  love  the  best.  I  feel  a  compel- 


OBERMANN        21 

ling  power  which  binds  me  to  every 
loving  influence ;  my  heart,  full  of  it- 
self, of  humanity,  and  of  the  primitive 
harmony  of  beings,  has  never  known 
any  personal  or  contentious  passion.  I 
love  myself,  but  as  a  part  of  nature,  in 
the  order  of  things  which  she  ordains, 
in  companionship  with  men  whom  she 
chooses,  whom  she  has  made,  and  in 
harmony  with  the  totality  of  things. 
Nothing  of  what  exists,  has,  in  truth, 
won  the  fullness  of  my  love,  and  a  void 
beyond  utterance  forever  fills  my  trou- 
bled soul.  But  all  that  I  love  might  ex- 
ist, the  whole  earth  might  be  according 
to  my  heart,  without  a  single  change  in 
nature,  or  in  man  himself,  excepting 
the  ephemeral  accidents  of  the  social 
order.  .  .  . 

I  love  existing  things ;  I  love  them 
as  they  are.  I  neither  desire,  nor  seek, 
nor  imagine  anything  outside  of  nature. 
My  thoughts,  so  far  from  wandering 
towards  strange  or  complex  aims,  so  far 


22        OBERMANN 

from  being  attracted  to  remote  or  un- 
usual things,  and  I,  so  far  from  being 
indifferent  to  what  is  around  me,  to 
what  nature  daily  produces,  or  aspiring 
to  what  is  denied  me,  to  things  foreign 
and  unfamiliar,  to  improbable  circum- 
stances, and  to  a  romantic  destiny,  — 
I  desire,  I  ask  of  nature  and  of  man,  I 
claim  for  the  whole  span  of  my  life, 
only  those  things  which  belong  inevi- 
tably to  nature,  which  all  men  must 
possess,  which  alone  can  employ  our 
days  and  fill  our  hearts,  and  which  form 
the  groundwork  of  life. 

While  I  do  not  crave  what  is  com- 
plex and  uncommon,  neither  do  I  long 
for  what  is  novel,  varied,  or  profuse. 
What  has  once  pleased  me,  will  always 
please  me ;  what  has  before  satisfied 
me,  will  satisfy  me  always.8  A  day  like 
unto  the  day  that  once  was  happy,  is 
still  a  happy  day  for  me.  .  .  . 

The  love  of  power  or  of  riches  is 
almost  as  foreign  to  my  nature  as  envy, 


OBERMANN        23 

hatred,  or  revenge.  Nothing  should 
alienate  me  from  other  men.  I  am 
the  rival  of  none ;  I  can  no  more  envy 
than  hate  them;  I  should  refuse  what 
impassions  them,  I  should  decline  to 
triumph  over  them,  and  I  do  not  even 
desire  to  surpass  them  in  virtue.  I  rely 
upon  my  natural  goodness.  Happy  in 
that  I  need  make  no  effort  not  to  do 
wrong,  I  shall  not  torment  myself 
without  cause ;  and  provided  I  am  an 
honest  man,  I  shall  not  pretend  to  be 
virtuous. 

Virtue  is  a  high  merit,  but  I  rejoice 
in  that  it  is  not  indispensable  to  me, 
and  I  leave  it  to  other  men ;  the  only 
rivalry  that  might  have  existed  between 
us,  is  thus  destroyed.  Their  virtues  are 
as  ambitious  as  their  passions  ;  they  dis- 
play them  with  ostentation,  and  what 
they  strive  for  is,  above  all,  priority. 
I  am  not,  nor  shall  I  ever  be,  their  com- 
petitor, even  on  this  point.  What  do  I 
lose  by  the  concession  of  this  superior- 


24        OBERMANN 

ity  ?  In  what  they  call  virtues,  the  only 
ones  that  are  useful  are  natural,  in  a 
man  constituted  as  I  am,  and  as  I  would 
willingly  believe  all  men  originally  are  ; 
the  others,  complex,  austere,  arrogant, 
and  imposing,  do  not  take  their  spring 
directly  from  man's  nature.  This  is 
why  I  consider  them  either  false  or 
empty,  and  am  not  anxious  to  obtain 
credit  for  them,  —  a  credit  which  is  in 
any  case  rather  uncertain.  .  .  . 

Whatever  happens,  I  must  remain 
always  the  same,  and  always  myself; 
not  precisely  what  I  am  in  the  midst 
of  ways  antagonistic  to  my  nature,  but 
what  I  feel  myself  to  be,  what  I  desire 
to  be,  what  I  am  in  that  internal  life, 
which  is  the  only  refuge  of  my  sorrow- 
ful affections. 

I  shall  examine  myself,  I  shall  study 
myself,  I  shall  sound  this  heart,  which 
is  naturally  true  and  loving,  but  which 
much  weariness  may  have  already  dis- 
couraged. I  shall  decide  what  I  am,  or 


OBERMANN        25 

rather  what  I  ought  to  be ;  and  having 
once  established  this  type,  I  shall  strive 
to  preserve  it  throughout  my  life,  con- 
vinced that  whatever  is  natural  to  me 
is  neither  dangerous  nor  to  be  con- 
demned, firm  in  the  belief  that  one  is 
never  right  unless  following  one's  own 
nature,9  and  fully  determined  to  repress 
nothing  in  myself,  excepting  what 
would  tend  to  alter  my  original  estate. 
I  have  known  the  enthusiasm  of  the 
sterner  virtues ;  in  my  proud  error, 
I  thought  to  replace  all  the  motive 
powers  of  social  life  by  this  other, 
equally  illusive,  motive  power.  My 
stoic  strength  braved  misfortune,  as 
well  as  passions,  and  I  was  convinced 
that  I  should  be  the  happiest  of  men 
if  I  were  the  most  virtuous.  The  illu- 
sion lasted,  in  its  full  force,  for  about  a 
month ;  a  single  incident  swept  it  away. 
Then  it  was  that  all  the  bitterness  of  a 
colorless  and  fleeting  life  came  to  fill 
my  soul,  after  it  had  renounced  the  last 


26        OBERMANN 

spell  that  had  beguiled  it.  Since  then 
I  have  made  no  further  pretence  of 
employing  my  life  ;  I  seek  only  to  fill 
it.  I  exact,  not  that  it  shall  be  virtuous, 
but  that  it  shall  never  be  culpable. 

And  how  can  one  aspire  even  to  this, 
how  attain  it  ?  Where  can  one  find 
days  that  are  easy,  simple,  employed, 
uniform  ?  How  escape  misfortune  ? 
This  is  the  limit  of  my  desire.  But 
what  a  destiny,  when  sorrows  endure, 
and  pleasures  vanish  !  Perchance  some 
days  of  peace  will  be  granted  to  me ; 
but  never  again  enchantment,  never 
intoxication,  never  a  moment  of  pure 
joy  ;  never!  and  I  am  not  yet  twenty- 
one  !  and  I  was  born  sensitive,  ardent ! 
and  I  have  never  tasted  the  joys  of  fru- 
ition !  and  after  death  .  .  .  Nothing 
more  in  life,  nothing  in  nature.  .  .  . 
I  have  not  wept ;  the  fountain  of  my 
tears  is  dry.  .  .  . 

You  who  know  me,  who  understand 
me,  but  who,  happier  and  wiser  than  I, 


OBERMANN        27 

submit  without  impatience  to  the  cus- 
toms of  life,  —  you  realize,  in  this  our 
doomed  separation,  the  nature  of  those 
desires  which  in  me  can  never  be  satis- 
fied. One  thing  consoles  me ;  you  are 
mine  ;  this  feeling  will  never  pass  away. 
.  .  .  You  are  the  staff  on  which  I  love 
to  lean  amid  the  restlessness  that  leads 
me  astray,  to  which  I  love  to  return 
after  I  have  tried  all  things,  and  have 
found  myself  alone  in  the  world.  Could 
we  live  together,  were  we  sufficient 
unto  each  other,  I  should  cease  my 
wanderings,  I  should  know  rest,  I 
should  accomplish  something  upon  the 
earth,  and  my  life  would  begin.  But 
I  must  wait,  seek,  press  onward  to  the 
unknown  ;  and,  ignorant  of  my  goal,  I 
must  fly  from  the  present,  even  as 
though  the  future  held  for  me  some 
hope. 

: 

| 
I 

•*          /     '< 


28        OBERMANN 
LETTER  V 

Saint-Maurice,™  August  i8th,  1st  year. 

AT  last  I  have  made  up  my  mind ; 
I  shall  pass  the  winter  here.  .  .  . 

I  slept  at  Villeneuve,"  a  melancholy 
spot  in  such  a  beautiful  country.  Be- 
fore the  heat  of  the  day,  I  wandered 
over  the  wooded  slopes  of  Saint-Try- 
phon,  and  through  the  unbroken  stretch 
of  orchards  which  cover  the  valley  as 
far  as  Bex.  I  walked  between  the  Alps, 
which,  on  each  side,  rose  in  two  high 
mountain-chains ;  surrounded  by  their 
snows,  I  took  my  way  along  a  level 
road  in  the  heart  of  a  fruitful  country, 
which,  in  times  past,  seems  to  have  lain 
almost  entirely  under  water. 

The  valley  of  the  Rhone,  from  Mar- 
tigny  to  the  lake,  is  almost  shut  in  by 
rocky  ledges,  covered  with  forests  and 
with  clearings,  which  form  the  first 
steps  of  the  Dent  de  Morcles  and  the  Dent 


* 

I 


OBERMANN        29 

du  Midi,  and  are  divided  only  by  the 
bed  of  the  river.12  Towards  the  north, 
these  ledges  are  wooded,  here  and  there, 
with  chestnut-trees,  and  near  the  sum- 
mit with  fir-trees.  In  this  wild  region 
is  my  dwelling,  at  the  foot  of  the  Dent 
du  Midi,  one  of  the  most  beautiful  of 
the  Alpine  peaks.  .  .  . 

At  sight  of  these  gorges,  fertile  and 
inhabited,  yet  still  wild,  I  turned  aside 
from  the  road  to  Italy,  which  at  this 
point  takes  a  bend  towards  the  town  of 
Bex,  and  pressing  on  towards  the  bridge 
of  the  Rhone,  I  wandered  through  paths 
and  across  fields  undreamed  of  by  our 
painters.  The  bridge,13  the  castle,  and 
the  sweep  of  the  Rhone,  are  grouped, 
at  this  point,  into  a  view  of  singular 
picturesqueness.  As  for  the  town,14  its 
only  remarkable  feature  is  its  simplicity. 
The  site  is  somewhat  melancholy,  but 
of  a  sadness  that  I  love.  The  moun- 
tains are  beautiful,  the  valley  level ;  the 
rocks  touch  the  town  and  seem  to 


» 


3o        OBERMANN 

cover  it ;  the  muffled  rumbling  of  the 
Rhone  gives  a  note  of  melancholy  to 
this  land,  which  lies  separated,  as  it 
were,  from  the  world,  hollowed  out 
and  shut  in  on  all  sides.  Peopled  and 
cultivated,  it  yet  seems  at  moments 
touched  by  the  curse  —  or  the  beauty 
—  of  the  austerity  of  the  deserts,  when 
black  clouds  overshadow  its  sweep 
down  the  mountain  sides,  darken  the 
gloomy  firs,  throng  together,  are  piled 
mass  upon  mass,  and  then,  like  a  som- 
bre dome,  hang  motionless  above  ;  or 
when,  on  a  cloudless  day,  the  sun's  burn- 
ing rays  concentrate  upon  it,  make  the 
unseen  vapors  seethe,  cause  all  things 
that  draw  breath  beneath  the  arid  sky 
to  throb  with  a  tormenting  heat,  and 
turn  this  all  too  beautiful  solitude  into 
a  grievous  waste.  .  .  . 

I  allowed  myself  to  be  allured  into 
staying  near  Saint-Maurice.  ...  I  wan- 
dered at  random  through  the  neighbor- 
hood, and  looked  at  the  most  attractive 


OBERMANN        31 

sites,  in  search  of  a  chance  dwelling. 
The  water,  the  depth  of  the  shade,  the 
solitude  of  the  moors,  filled  me  with 
delight.  ...  I  had  followed  the  wind- 
ings of  field  and  forest,  had  crossed 
swift  streams,  when  I  came  upon  a 
lonely  house  on  the  edge  of  the  woods, 
standing  among  the  most  solitary  clear- 
ings. A  moderately  good  dwelling,  a 
wooden  barn,  a  vegetable  garden  bor- 
dered by  a  wide  stream,  two  springs  of 
pure  water,  a  few  rocks,  the  sound  of 
the  torrents,  the  land  sloping  on  every 
side,  hawthorn  hedges,  an  abundant 
vegetation,  a  broad  field  stretching  out 
beneath  the  scattered  beeches  and  chest- 
nut-trees, even  to  the  foot  of  the  moun- 
tain-firs, —  this  is  Charrieres.  .  .  . 

I  want  to  enjoy  Charrieres  before 
the  winter.  I  want  to  be  there  for  the 
chestnut  harvest,  and  I  am  determined 
not  to  lose  the  quiet  autumn  in  its 
midst. 

In  twenty  days  I  shall  take  posses- 


32        OBERMANN 

sion  of  the  house,  the  chestnut  grove, 
and  apart  of  the  meadows  and  orchards. 
To  the  farmer  I  leave  the  rest  of  the 
pastures  and  fruit,  the  vegetable  garden, 
the  hemp  field,  and  especially  the  ara- 
ble ground. 

The  stream  winds  through  my  part 
of  the  domain.  I  have  the  poorest  land, 
but  the  deepest  shades  and  the  most 
secluded  nooks.  The  moss  prevents  the 
harvesting  of  the  hay  ;  the  close-grow- 
ing chestnut-trees  give  little  fruit;  there 
is  no  view  over  the  long  stretch  of  the 
Rhone  valley ;  everything  is  wild  and 
neglected ;  there  is  even  a  narrow  space 
between  the  rocks  which  has  been  left 
untouched,  and  where  the  trees,  leveled 
by  the  wind  and  crumbling  with  age, 
hold  the  ooze,  and  form  a  kind  of  dike ; 
alders  and  hazel-trees  have  taken  root, 
and  made  of  it  an  impenetrable  maze. 
But  the  stream  filters  through  this  mass, 
and  flows,  sparkling  with  foam,  into  a 
natural  pool  wondrously  limpid.  From 


OBERMANN        33 

there  it  makes  its  way  between  the 
rocks;  its  hurried  waves  flow  over  the 
moss ;  and  far  below,  it  slackens  its 
course,  leaves  the  shadows,  and  passes 
in  front  of  the  house,  spanned  by  a 
bridge  of  fir  planks. 

Wolves,  driven  down  by  the  depth 
of  the  snows,  come,  it  is  said,  in  winter 
time,  in  search  of  bones  and  fragments 
of  the  food  which  even  in  pastoral  val- 
leys is  a  necessity  to  man.  The  fear  of 
these  animals  has  long  kept  this  dwell- 
ing uninhabited.  But  such  a  fear  is 
not  what  would  alarm  me.  Would  that 
man  might  leave  me  free  in  this  lair  of 
the  wolves  ! 


LETTER  VI 

Saint -Maurice,  August  26th,  1st  year. 

DO  you  believe  that  a  man  who 
has  fulfilled   his   time  without 
having  loved  has  truly  entered  into  the 


34        OBERMANN 

mysteries  of  life,  that  his  heart  is  known 
to  him,  and  that  the  fullness  of  his  ex- 
istence has  been  revealed  to  him  ?  To 
me  it  seems  as  though  he  had  halted 
half  way,  and  had  seen  only  from  afar 
what  the  world  might  have  held  for 
him. 


LETTER  VII 

Saint-Maurice,  September  jd,  1st  year. 

1HAVE  been  to  the  region  of  per- 
petual ice,  on  the  Dent  du  Midi. 
Before  the  sun  shone  upon  the  valley 
I  had  already  reached  the  bluff  over- 
looking the  town,  and  was  crossing 
the  partly  cultivated  stretch  of  ground 
which  covers  it.  I  went  on  by  a  steep 
ascent,  through  dense  forests  of  fir- 
trees,  leveled  in  many  places  by  win- 
ters long  since  passed  away :  fruitful 
decay,  vast  and  confused  mass  of  a  veg- 
etation that  had  died  and  had  regermi- 


OBERMANN        35 

nated  from  the  remains  of  its  former 
life.  At  eight  o'clock  I  had  reached 
the  bare  summit  which  crowns  the  as- 
cent, and  which  forms  the  first  salient 
step  in  that  wondrous  pile  whose  high- 
est peak  still  rose  so  far  beyond  me. 
Then  I  dismissed  my  guide,  and  put 
my  own  powers  to  the  test.  I  wanted 
that  no  hireling  should  intrude  upon 
this  Alpine  liberty,  that  no  man  of 
the  plains  should  come  to  weaken  the 
austerity  of  these  savage  regions.  I  felt 
my  whole  being  broaden,  as  it  was 
left  alone  among  the  obstacles  and  the 
dangers  of  a  rugged  nature,  far  from 
the  artificial  trammels  and  the  ingen- 
ious oppression  of  men. 

I  stood  fixed  and  exultant  as  I 
watched  the  rapid  disappearance  of  the 
only  man  whom  I  was  likely  to  see 
among  these  mighty  precipices.  On 
the  ground  I  left  watch,  money,  every- 
thing that  I  had  about  me,  and  almost 
all  my  clothing,  .  .  .  and  holding  be- 


36        OBERMANN 

tween  my  teeth  the  branch  I  had  cut 
to  help  me  in  the  descent,  I  started  to 
crawl  along  the  ridge  of  rocks  which 
connects  this  minor  peak  with  the  prin- 
cipal mass.  Several  times  I  dragged  my- 
self between  two  bottomless  chasms. 
And  in  this  way  I  reached  the  granite 
peaks. 

My  guide  had  told  me  that  I  could 
climb  no  higher,  and  for  some  time  I 
was  brought  to  a  standstill.  But  at  last, 
by  descending  a  short  distance,  I  found 
an  easier  way,  and,  climbing  with  the 
audacity  of  a  mountaineer,  I  reached  a 
hollow  filled  with  frozen  and  crusted 
snow,  which  had  lain  unmelted  by  the 
summer  suns.  Still  I  mounted  higher ; 
but  on  reaching  the  foot  of  the  high- 
est peak  of  the  Dent,  I  found  I  could 
not  climb  to  its  summit,  for  its  steep 
sides  were  scarcely  out  of  the  perpen- 
dicular, and  it  seemed  to  rise  five  hun- 
dred feet  above  me. 

I  had  crossed  few  fields  of  snow,  yet 


OBERMANN        37 

my  unprotected  eyes,  wearied  by  its 
brilliancy,  and  parched  by  the  glare 
of  the  noon  sun  on  its  frozen  surface, 
could  see  but  vaguely  the  surrounding 
objects.  Besides,  many  of  the  peaks 
were  unknown  to  me,  and  I  could  be 
sure  of  only  the  most  important  ones. 
Yet  I  could  not  mistake  the  colossal 
summit  of  Mont  Blanc,  which  rose  far 
above  me;  that  of  Velan;  one  more 
distant,  but  still  higher,  which  I  took 
to  be  Mont  Rosa ;  and,  on  the  opposite 
side  of  the  valley,  near  me  but  lower 
down,  the  Dent  de  Morcles,  beyond  the 
chasms.  The  peak  that  I  could  not 
climb,  shut  off  what  was  perhaps  the 
most  striking  part  of  this  vast  scene. 
For,  behind  it,  stretched  the  long  depths 
of  the  Valais,  inclosed  on  each  side  by 
the  glaciers  of  Sanetsch,  of  Lauterbrun- 
nen,  and  of  the  Pennine  Alps,  and  end- 
ing in  the  domes  of  the  Saint  Gothard 
and  the  Titlis,  the  snows  of  the  Furca, 
and  the  pyramids  of  the  Schreckhorn 
and  the  Finster-Aar-Horn. 


38        OBERMANN 

But  this  view  of  the  mountain-tops 
outspread  at  the  feet  of  man,  this  view 
so  grand,  so  majestic,  so  far  removed 
from  the  monotonous  vacuity  of  the 
plains,  was  still  not  the  object  of  my 
quest  in  the  midst  of  unfettered  nature, 
of  silent  fixity,  of  unsullied  ether.  On 
the  lowlands,  natural  man  is  of  neces- 
sity undergoing  continual  change  by 
breathing  that  social  atmosphere,  so 
dense,  stormy,  seething,  forever  trou- 
bled by  the  clamor  of  the  arts,  the  din 
of  ostensible  pleasures,  the  cries  of  hate, 
and  the  endless  laments  of  anxiety  and 
of  sorrow.  But  on  those  desert  peaks, 
where  the  sky  is  measureless,  and  the 
air  is  more  stable,  and  time  less  fleeting, 
and  life  more  permanent,  —  there,  all 
nature  gives  eloquent  expression  to  a 
vaster  order,  a  more  visible  harmony, 
an  eternal  whole.  There,  man  is  rein- 
stated in  his  changeful  but  indestructi- 
ble form ;  he  breathes  a  free  air  far  from 
social  emanations ;  he  exists  only  for 


OBERMANN        39 

himself  and  for  the  universe ;  he  lives 
a  life  of  reality  in  the  midst  of  sublime 
unity. 

This  was  the  feeling  that  I  desired, 
that  I  sought.  Uncertain  of  myself,  in 
an  order  of  things  which  has  been  de- 
vised with  unwearied  pains  by  ingen- 
ious and  childish  minds,  I  scaled  the 
heights  to  ask  of  nature  why  I  should 
feel  ill  at  ease  in  their  midst.  I  wished 
to  know  whether  my  existence  was  out 
of  place  in  the  human  economy,  or 
whether  the  present  social  order  is  un- 
related to  eternal  harmony,  like  some 
irregularity  or  accidental  exception  in 
the  progress  of  the  world.  At  last  I 
believe  I  am  sure  of  myself.  There  are 
moments  which  dispel  mistrust,  pre- 
judice, uncertainties, —  when  the  truth 
comes  to  us  with  an  overruling  and  un- 
alterable conviction.  .  .  . 

I  cannot  give  you  a  true  impression 
of  this  new  world,  or  express  the  per- 
manence of  the  mountains  in  the  Ian- 


40        OBERMANN 

guage  of  the  plains.  The  hours  seemed 
to  me  both  more  serene  and  more  pro- 
ductive; and,  even  as  though  the  plan- 
ets, amid  the  universal  calm,  had  been 
arrested  in  their  course,  I  was  conscious 
that  the  gradual  train  of  my  thoughts, 
full  of  deliberation  and  of  energy,  could 
in  no  wise  be  hastened,  yet  was  press- 
ing forward  at  unusual  speed,  .  .  .  and 
I  inferred  that  the  consciousness  of 
existence  is  really  more  inert  and  more 
sterile  amid  the  tumult  of  human  sur- 
roundings. I  realized  that  thought, 
while  less  hurried,  is  more  truly  active 
among  the  mountains — on  their  peace- 
ful heights — even  though  visible  move- 
ments are  more  gradual.  The  man  of 
the  valleys  consumes  without  enjoyment 
the  span  of  his  restless  and  feverish 
days  ;  he  is  like  unto  those  ever-moving 
insects  which  waste  their  efforts  in  futile 
vacillations,  while  others,  equally  weak, 
but  more  tranquil,  by  their  straight  and 
unflagging  course,  outstrip  them  in  the 
race. 


OBERMANN        41 

The  day  was  hot,  the  horizon  veiled 
with  haze,  the  valleys  flooded  with  mist. 
The  brilliancy  of  the  fields  of  ice  filled 
the  lower  atmosphere  with  its  lumi- 
nous reflections;  but  an  undreamed-of 
purity  seemed  to  form  the  essence  of 
the  air  I  breathed.  At  that  height, 
no  exhalations  from  the  lowlands,  no 
effects  of  light  and  shade,  either  dis- 
turbed or  interrupted  the  vague  and 
sombre  depth  of  the  skies.  Their  seem- 
ing color  was  no  longer  that  pale  and 
luminous  blue,  the  soft  canopy  of  the 
plains,  the  charming  and  delicate  blend 
which  forms  a  visible  inclosure  to 
the  inhabited  earth,  and  is  a  rest  and 
a  goal  to  the  eye.  In  those  high  re- 
gions, the  invisible  ether  allowed  the 
gaze  to  lose  itself  in  boundless  space  ; 
in  the  midst  of  the  splendor  of  the 
sun  and  of  the  glaciers,  to  seek  other 
worlds  and  other  suns,  as  under  the 
vast  sky  of  the  night ;  and  above  the 
burning  atmosphere  of  the  day,  to  pen- 
etrate a  nocturnal  universe. 


42        OBERMANN 

Stealthily  the  mist  rose  from  the 
glaciers  and  was  shaped  into  clouds 
at  my  feet.  The  snows  had  lost  their 
dazzling  brightness,  and  the  sky  grew 
deeper  still  and  full  of  shadow.  A  fog 
covered  the  Alps ;  here  and  there  a  sol- 
itary peak  rose  out  of  this  ocean  of 
mist ;  held  in  their  rugged  clefts,  lines 
of  shimmering  snow  gave  the  gran- 
ite a  blacker  and  a  sterner  look.  The 
snow-white  dome  of  Mont  Blanc  lifted 
its  imperishable  mass  above  this  gray 
and  moving  sea,  above  these  drifts  of 
fog,  which  were  furrowed  by  the  wind 
and  piled  in  towering  waves.  A  black 
point  appeared  in  this  abyss;  it  rose 
rapidly,  and  came  straight  towards  me ; 
it  was  the  mighty  eagle  of  the  Alps; 
his  wings  were  wet,  his  eye  fierce ;  he 
was  in  search  of  prey,  but  at  the  sight 
of  man  he  fled  with  a  sinister  cry  and 
was  lost  as  he  plunged  into  the  clouds. 
Twenty  times  the  cry  reechoed,  but 
the  sounds  were  short  and  sharp,  like 


OBERMANN        43 

twenty  separate  cries  in  the  univer- 
sal silence.  Then  absolute  stillness  fell 
upon  all  things,  as  though  sound  itself 
had  ceased  to  exist,  and  the  power  of 
sound  had  been  effaced  from  the  uni- 
verse. Never  has  silence  been  known 
in  the  tumultuous  valleys ;  only  on  the 
icy  summits  does  that  stability,  that 
solemn  permanence  reign,  which  no 
tongue  can  express,  which  the  imagi- 
nation is  powerless  to  attain.  Except 
for  the  memories  of  the  plains,  man 
could  not  conceive  of  any  movement 
in  nature  beyond  himself;  the  course 
of  the  planets  would  be  incomprehen- 
sible ;  even  to  the  changes  of  the  mist, 
everything  would  seem  to  subsist  in  the 
very  act  of  change.  Each  actual  mo- 
ment having  the  appearance  of  conti- 
nuity,13 man  would  have  the  certainty 
without  ever  having  the  sentiment  of 
the  succession  of  things  ;  and  the  per- 
petual mutations  of  the  universe  would 
be  to  his  mind  an  impenetrable  mystery. 


44        OBERMANN 

I  wish  that  I  could  have  kept  surer 
records,  not  of  my  general  impressions 
in  that  land  of  silence,  for  they  will 
never  be  forgotten,  but  of  the  ideas  to 
which  they  gave  birth,  and  of  which 
scarcely  a  memory  has  been  left  to  me. 
In  the  midst  of  scenes  so  different,  the 
imagination  recalls  with  difficulty  an 
order  of  thought  which  seems  to  be  in 
disaccord  with  all  the  objects  of  its  pre- 
sent surroundings.  I  should  have  had 
to  write  down  what  I  felt ;  but  then 
my  emotions  would  soon  have  fallen  to 
the  level  of  everyday  experience.  This 
solicitude  to  harvest  one's  thought  for 
future  use  has  in  it  an  element  of  ser- 
vility which  belongs  to  the  painstaking 
efforts  of  a  dependent  life. 

Not  in  moments  of  ardor  does  one 
take  heed  of  other  times  and  other  men ; 
in  those  hours  one's  thoughts  are  not 
born  for  the  sake  of  artificial  conven- 
tionalities, of  fame,  or  even  for  the 
good  of  others.  One  is  more  natural, 


OBERMANN        45 

without  even  a  desire  to  utilize  the  pre- 
sent moment :  no  thoughts  that  come 
at  one's  behest,  no  reflection,  no  spirit 
of  intellectual  investigation,  no  search 
for  hidden  things,  no  attempt  to  find 
the  new  and  strange.  Thought  is  not 
active  and  ordered,  but  passive  and  free: 
dreams,  and  complete  abandonment ; 
depth  without  comprehension,  great- 
ness without  enthusiasm,  energy  with- 
out volition ;  to  muse,  not  to  meditate, 
—  this  is  one's  attitude.  Do  not,  then, 
be  surprised  if,  after  an  experience  in 
thought  and  emotion  which  will  per- 
haps never  be  repeated  during  my  life, 
I  still  have  nothing  to  tell  you.  You 
remember  those  nature-lovers  of  the 
Dauphine,  who  expected  so  much  from 
Jean-Jacques,  and  were  so  bitterly  dis- 
appointed. They  went  with  him  to  a 
vantage  ground  well  suited  to  the  kin- 
dling of  a  poetic  genius ;  they  waited 
for  a  magnificent  burst  of  eloquence ; 
but  the  author  of  Julie  sat  on  the 


46        OBERMANN 

ground,  dallied  with  some  blades  of 
grass,  and  said  not  a  word. 

It  may  have  been  five  o'clock  when 
I  noticed  how  the  shadows  began  to 
lengthen,  and  how  the  cold  crept  over 
me,  in  the  angle,  open  to  the  western 
sky,  where  I  had  long  lain  upon  the 
granite  rock.  It  was  too  treacherous  to 
walk  over  those  steep  crags,  and  so  I 
could  not  keep  in  motion.  The  mists 
had  disappeared,  and  I  saw  that  the 
evening  was  beautiful  even  in  the  val- 
leys. .  .  . 

Descending  once  more  to  inhabited 
earth,  I  felt  that  I  again  took  up  the 
long  chain  of  anxieties  and  weariness. 
I  returned  at  ten  o'clock  ;  the  moon 
shone  upon  my  window.  I  heard  the 
rushing  of  the  Rhone ;  there  was  no 
wind  ;  the  city  slept.  I  thought  of  the 
mountains  I  had  left,  of  Charrieres 
which  is  to  be  my  home,  of  the  lib- 
erty which  I  have  claimed  as  mine. 


OBERMANN        47 


LETTER   VIII 

Saint-Maurice,  September  ifth,  1st  year. 

I  HAVE  just  returned  from  a  trip 
of  several  days  among  the  moun- 
tains. .  .  .  Before  retiring,  I  opened  a 
letter;  it  was  not, in  your  handwriting ; 
the  word  haste,  written  in  a  conspic- 
uous way,  rilled  me  with  uneasiness. 
Everything  is  open  to  suspicion  when 
one  has  with  difficulty  escaped  from 
former  fetters.  .  .  . 

I  think  you  will  readily  suspect  what 
it  was.  I  was  crushed,  overwhelmed ; 
then  I  decided  to  neglect  everything, 
to  rise  above  everything,  to  forever 
abandon  all  things  that  would  be  a 
link  to  the  life  I  had  left  behind.  But 
after  many  uncertainties,  whether  rea- 
sonable or  weak  I  know  not,  I  thought 
it  best  to  sacrifice  the  present,  for  the 
sake  of  future  rest  and  security.  I  sub- 
mit, I  leave  Charrieres. 


48        OBERMANN 

This  morning  I  could  not  endure 
the  thought  of  so  great  a  change.  I 
went  to  Charrieres.  ...  I  stood  among 
the  fields ;  it  was  the  last  mowing.  I 
lingered  on  a  rock,  to  see  only  the 
sky ;  it  was  veiled  with  haze.  I  looked 
at  the  chestnut-trees;  the  leaves  were 
falling.  Then  I  went  to  the  river,  as 
though  I  feared  lest  that  also  might  be 
silent ;  but  it  was  still  flowing. 

Inexplicable  necessity  of  human  af- 
fairs !  I  am  going  to  Lyons ;  I  shall  go 
to  Paris ;  this  is  my  decision.  Farewell. 
Let  us  pity  the  man  who  finds  but  lit- 
tle, and  from  whom  even  that  little  is 
taken  away. 


LETTER   I  X 

Lyons,  October  22d,  1st  year. 

1LEFT    for    Meterville    two    days 
after  your  departure  from  Lyons, 
and  spent  eighteen  days  there.  .  .  .  The 


OBERMANN        49 

grounds  are  not  extensive,  and  the 
situation  is  more  restful  than  striking. 
You  know  the  owners,  their  character, 
their  ways,  their  simple  friendship,  their 
winning  manners.  I  arrived  at  a  happy 
moment.  On  the  following  day  the 
grapes  were  to  be  gathered  from  a  long 
trellis,  open  to  the  south,  and  facing  the 
woods  of  Armand.  At  supper-time  it 
was  decided  that  the  grapes,  which  were 
to  be  made  into  choice  wine,  must  be 
carefully  picked  with  our  own  hands, 
so  as  to  leave  the  unripe  bunches  on 
the  vines  to  mature. 

On  the  next  day,  as  soon  as  the 
morning  mists  had  lifted,  I  put  a  win- 
nowing fan  on  a  wheelbarrow,  and  was 
the  first  to  go  to  the  farther  end  of  the 
vineyard  and  begin  the  harvesting.  I 
worked  almost  alone,  without  trying  to 
find  a  quicker  method ;  I  liked  this 
deliberate  way,  and  saw  with  regret 
that  others  came,  now  and  then,  to 
help ;  the  harvesting  lasted,  I  believe,  for 


50        OBERMANN 

twelve  days.  My  wheelbarrow  came 
and  went  through  unfrequented  paths, 
overgrown  with  wet  grass  ;  I  chose  the 
least  level,  the  most  uneven  ones,  and 
thus  the  days  passed  by  in  forgetfulness, 
in  the  heart  of  the  mist,  in  the  midst 
of  the  fruit,  under  an  autumn  sun.  And 
when  the  evening  came,  we  drank  our 
tea,  with  milk  warm  from  the  cow,  and 
smiled  at  the  men  who  go  in  search  of 
pleasures ;  we  walked  beside  the  old 
yoke-elms,  and  we  lay  down  content. 

I  have  seen  the  vanities  of  life,  and 
in  my  heart  I  carry  the  glowing  germ 
of  the  strongest  passions.  There,  too, 
I  bear  the  consciousness  of  great  social 
issues,  and  of  philosophic  ideas.  I  have 
read  Marcus  Aurelius,  and  was  not  sur- 
prised ;  I  can  conceive  of  the  sterner 
virtues,  and  even  of  monastic  heroism. 
All  this  can  stir  my  soul,  but  cannot 
fill  it.  My  wheelbarrow,  which  I  load 
with  fruit  and  push  gently  along,  is  a 
firmer  support.  The  hours  move  peace- 


OBERMANN        51 

fully  on,  and  this  slow  and  useful  mo- 
tion, this  measured  walk,  seem  better 
to  represent  the  needs  of  our  daily  life. 


LETTER   XI 

Paris,  June  2fthy  2d  year. 

1  OFTEN  spend  a  couple  of  hours 
at  the  library,  not  exactly  to  gain 
knowledge,  for  that  desire  has  mate- 
rially cooled  of  late,  but  because,  not 
knowing  how  to  fill  those  hours  which 
still  flow  irrevocably  on,  I  find  them 
less  intolerable  when  employed  outside 
than  when  consumed  in  the  house.  Oc- 
cupations that  are  somewhat  regulated 
suit  me  in  my  discouragement ;  too 
much  liberty  would  leave  me  in  indo- 
lence. I  feel  more  at  rest  among  peo- 
ple as  silent  as  myself  than  when  I  am 
alone  in  the  midst  of  a  seething  crowd. 
I  love  those  long  halls,  some  empty, 
others  filled  with  studious  men,  the  an- 


52        OBERMANN 

cient  and  cold  repository  of  all  human 
vanities  and  efforts.  .  .  . 

The  halls  surround  a  long,  quiet 
court,  overgrown  with  grass,  where 
two  or  three  statues  stand,  a  few  ruins, 
and  a  basin  of  green  water,  which  looks 
to  be  as  old  as  the  monuments.  I  rarely 
leave  without  lingering  for  a  time  in 
this  silent  inclosure.  I  love  to  dream  as 
I  walk  upon  these  ancient  pavements, 
cut  from  the  quarries  so  that  their  hard 
and  barren  surface  might  be  laid  be- 
neath the  feet  of  man.  But  time  and 
neglect  have,  in  a  way,  buried  them 
anew  under  the  ground,  by  covering 
them  with  a  fresh  layer  of  earth,  and 
adding  the  green  grass  and  the  hues 
that  were  its  portion  of  old.  I  find 
these  pavements  more  eloquent,  at 
times,  than  the  books  that  have  ab- 
sorbed me. 

Yesterday,  when  I  was  consulting 
the  Encyclopedic,  I  opened  the  volume 
at  a  chance  page,  and  do  not  even  re- 


OBERMANN        53 

member  now  the  title  of  the  article ; 
but  it  spoke  of  a  man,  who,  weary 
of  tumult  and  affliction,  plunged  into 
complete  solitude  by  following  out  one 
of  those  resolutions  which  conquer  cir- 
cumstances and  lead  us  to  congratulate 
ourselves  forever  after  on  having  had  so 
much  strength  of  will.  The  idea  of 
this  independent  life  did  not  recall  to 
my  imagination  either  the  free  soli- 
tudes of  the  Ismaus,  or  the  happy 
isles  of  the  Pacific,  or  the  nearer  Alps 
already  so  deeply  regretted.  But  a  clear 
memory  pictured  vividly  to  my  mind, 
with  a  sense  of  wonder  and  inspiration, 
the  barren  rocks  and  the  woods  of  Fon- 
tainebleau.  .  .  . 

You  know  that  when  I  was  still 
young,  I  lived  for  several  years  in  Paris. 
My  parents,  in  spite  of  their  love  for 
the  city,  spent,  at  different  times,  the 
month  of  September  with  friends  in 
the  country.  One  year  it  was  at  Fon- 
tainebleau,  and  twice  again  we  stayed 


54        OBERMANN 

with  these  same  friends,  who,  at  that 
time,  lived  at  the  foot  of  the  forest, 
towards  the  river.  I  was,  I  believe, 
fourteen,  fifteen,  and  seventeen  years 
of  age,  when  I  saw  Fontainebleau.  Af- 
ter a  restricted,  inactive,  and  tedious 
childhood,  I  felt  as  a  man  in  some 
ways,  but  was  still  a  child  in  many 
others.  Awkward  and  timid,  anticipat- 
ing all  things,  it  may  be,  but  knowing 
nothing,  an  alien  amid  my  surroundings, 
my  nature  was  characterized  by  restless- 
ness and  discontent.  The  first  time  I 
went  to  the  forest  I  was  not  alone ;  I 
cannot  clearly  recall  my  impressions, 
and  merely  know  that  that  spot  was 
dearer  to  me  than  any  other,  and  was 
the  only  one  to  which  I  longed  to  re- 
turn. 

The  following  year  I  wandered 
eagerly  through  these  solitudes ;  I  pur- 
posely went  astray,  and  was  overjoyed 
when  I  had  completely  lost  my  way, 
and  could  not  find  any  frequented  path. 


OBERMANN        55 

When  I  came  to  the  edge  of  the  forest, 
I  saw  with  regret  the  wide  expanse  of 
bare  plains,  and  the  distant  steeples. 
Then  I  turned  back  and  plunged  into 
the  densest  part  of  the  woods,  and  when 
I  reached  a  clearing,  shut  in  on  all 
sides,  where  nothing  could  be  seen  but 
stretches  of  sand  and  of  juniper- trees, 
there  came  to  me  a  sense  of  peace,  of 
liberty,  of  savage  joy,  the  sway  of  nature 
first  felt  in  careless  youth.  Yet  I  was 
not  gay  ;  almost  happy,  I  felt  only  the 
exuberance  of  well-being.  But  enjoy- 
ment grew  wearisome,  and  a  feeling  of 
sadness  crept  over  me  as  I  turned  my 
steps  homeward. 

Often  I  was  in  the  forest  before  the 
rising  of  the  sun.  I  climbed  the  hills 
still  deep  in  shadow  ;  I  was  all  wet 
from  the  dew-covered  underbrush  ;  and 
when  the  sun  shone  out  I  still  longed 
for  that  mystic  light,  precursor  of  the 
dawn.  I  loved  the  deep  gullies,  the  dark 
valleys,  the  dense  woods  ;  I  loved  the 


56        OBERMANN 

hills  covered  with  heather;  I  loved  the 
fallen  boulders  and  the  rugged  rocks,16 
and,  still  better,  I  loved  the  moving 
sands,  their  barren  wastes  untrodden  by 
the  foot  of  man,  but  furrowed  here  and 
there  by  the  restless  tracks  of  the  roe 
or  the  fleeing  hare.  When  I  saw  a 
squirrel,  when  I  startled  a  deer,  I  paused, 
I  felt  more  content,  and  for  a  moment 
I  ceased  my  wanderings.  It  was  then 
that  I  noticed  the  birch,  a  lonely  tree 
which  even  in  those  days  rilled  me  with 
sadness,  and  which,  since  that  time,  I 
have  never  seen  without  a  sense  of 
pleasure.  I  love  the  birch;  I  love  that 
smooth,  white,  curling  bark  ;  that  wild 
trunk ;  those  drooping  branches ;  the 
flutter  of  the  leaves,  and  all  that  aban- 
donment, simplicity  of  nature,  attitude 
of  the  desert. 

Wasted  hours,  never  to  be  forgotten ! 
Vain  illusions  of  a  responsive  and  im- 
pressionable nature  !  How  great  is  man 
in  his  inexperience  ;  how  productive 


OBERMANN        57 

would  he  be,  if  the  cold  glance  of  his 
fellow,  the  sterile  breath  of  injustice, 
came  not  to  wither  his  heart !  I  had 
need  of  happiness.  I  was  born  to  suf- 
fer. You  know  those  sombre  days,  fore- 
runners of  the  frost,  when  even  the 
dawn,  as  it  gathers  the  mist,  heralds 
the  light  by  touching  the  cloud-mass 
with  a  sinister  glow  of  fiery  color. 
That  gloomy  veil,  those  sudden  gales, 
those  pale  gleams,  that  whistling  of  the 
wind  through  the  trees  as  they  bend 
and  tremble,  those  endless  wails  like  fu- 
neral lamentations,  —  such  is  the  morn- 
ing of  life ;  at  noon,  colder  and  more 
enduring  gales ;  at  eventide,  denser 
gloom,  and  the  day  of  man  is  finished. 
That  specious  and  perpetual  illusion, 
which  is  born  with  the  heart  of  man, 
and  would  seem  to  have  a  life  as  en- 
during as  his  own,  was  rekindled  in 
me  one  day ;  I  went  so  far  as  to  think 
that  my  longings  would  be  fulfilled. 
But  this  sudden  and  all  too  impetuous 


58        OBERMANN 

fire  burned  itself  out  in  empty  space, 
and  was  quenched  ere  it  had  shed 
abroad  one  ray  of  light.  Even  as  in  the 
season  of  storms  a  sudden  lightning- 
streak  will  gleam  in  the  cloud  -  dark 
night,  to  alarm  all  living  creatures. 

It  was  in  March ;  I  was  at  Lu — . 
There  were  violets  at  the  foot  of  the 
thickets,  and  lilacs  in  a  little  meadow, 
springlike  and  peaceful,  open  to  the 
southern  sun.  The  house  stood  high 
above.  A  terraced  garden  hid  the  win- 
dows from  sight.  Below  the  meadow, 
steep  and  rugged  rocks  formed  wall 
upon  wall ;  at  the  foot,  a  wide  torrent, 
and  beyond,  other  ledges  covered  with 
fields,  with  hedges,  and  with  firs ! 
Across  all  this  stretched  the  ancient 
walls  of  the  city  ;  an  owl  had  made  his 
home  among  the  ruined  towers.  In 
the  evening,  the  moon  shone,  distant 
horns  gave  answering  calls ;  and  the 
voice  that  I  shall  never  hear  again  ! .  .  . 
All  this  deceived  me.  My  life  has,  be- 


OBERMANN        59 

fore  now,  held  but  this  solitary  mistake. 
Why  then  this  memory  of  Fontaine- 
bleau,  and  not  that  of  Lu —  ? 


LETTER  XII 

July  28th,  2d  year. 

AT  last  I  feel  as  though  I  were  in 
the  desert.  Here,  there  are  wide 
tracts  of  land  without  a  trace  of  man. 
I  have  escaped,  for  a  season,  from  those 
restless  cares  which  consume  our  years, 
mingle  our  life  with  the  darkness  that 
goes  before,  and  the  darkness  that  fol- 
lows after,  and  grant  it  no  larger  boon 
than  to  be  a  less  tranquil  void.  .  .  . 

Can  you  understand  the  joy  I  feel 
when  my  foot  sinks  into  the  moving 
and  burning  sands,  when  I  walk  with 
difficulty,  and  there  is  no  water,  no 
freshness,  no  shade  ?  I  see  a  mute  and 
barren  stretch  of  land  ;  bare,  decayed, 
and  shattered  rocks ;  and  the  forces 


60        OBERMANN 

of  nature  laid  under  subjection  to  the 
forces  of  time.  Is  it  not  like  unto  a 
sense  of  peace  that  falls  upon  me, 
when  I  find,  in  the  outer  world,  beneath 
a  burning  sky,  obstacles  and  excesses 
other  than  those  of  my  own  heart  ? 

I  do  not  care  to  know  where  I  am ; 
on  the  contrary,  I  go  astray  whenever 
I  can.  Often  I  walk  in  a  straight  line, 
without  following  any  path.  I  strive 
not  to  keep  any  trace  of  my  way,  and 
not  to  grow  too  familiar  with  the  for- 
est, so  as  always  to  have  something 
new  to  find.  There  is  one  path  that  I 
love  to  follow  ;  it  winds  in  a  circle, 
keeping  to  the  line  of  the  forest,  and 
leads  neither  to  the  plains  nor  to  the 
city  ;  it  goes  by  no  wonted  course  ;  it 
is  neither  in  the  valleys  nor  on  the 
heights ;  it  seems  to  have  no  end ;  it 
passes  through  everything,  it  reaches 
nothing ;  I  think  I  shall  tread  this  path 
all  my  life.  .... 

In  former  days,  when  I  wandered 


6i 

through  these  woods,  I  saw,  in  a  dense 
thicket,  two  roes  fleeing  from  a  wolf, 
who  was  close  upon  them.  I  felt  sure 
he  would  capture  them,  and  followed, 
to  be  in  at  the  struggle,  and  to  help 
them  if  I  could.  They  sprang  from 
the  cover  of  the  woods  into  a  clear- 
ing filled  with  rocks  and  heather  ;  but 
when  I  reached  the  spot  they  were  out 
of  sight.  Then  I  scrambled  down  into 
the  very  depths  of  the  rough  and  hol- 
low moor,  from  which  large  quantities 
of  sandstone  had  been  quarried  for  the 
street  pavements ;  but  I  found  nothing. 
On  my  way  back  to  the  forest  by  a  dif- 
ferent path,  I  came  upon  a  dog,  who 
stood  gazing  at  me  in  silence  until  I 
started  to  move  on.  Then  he  barked, 
and  I  saw  that  I  had  almost  stepped 
upon  the  threshold  of  the  dwelling 
over  which  he  was  watching.  It  was 
a  sort  of  cave,  inclosed  partly  by  a  nat- 
ural wall  of  rock,  and  partly  by  piles  of 
stones,  branches  of  juniper,  and  heaps 


62        OBERMANN 

of  heather  and  moss.  A  workman,  who 
for  more  than  thirty  years  had  cut  stone 
in  the  neighboring  quarries,  having 
neither  family  nor  goods,  had  retired 
to  this  spot  so  as  to  be  released  from 
forced  labor  in  his  last  days,  and  to 
escape  the  workhouse  and  contempt. 
Near  his  rock-dwelling,  in  a  barren 
piece  of  ground,  was  a  garden  plot; 
and  together  they  lived,  he,  his  dog,  and 
his  cat,  on  bread,  water,  and  liberty.17 
"  I  have  worked  much,  and  have  had 
nothing,"  he  said  to  me ;  "  but  at  last 
I  am  at  rest,  and  soon  I  shall  die."  It 
was  the  story  of  humanity,  told  me  by 
this  uncouth  man.  .  .  . 

You  may  now  understand  the  power 
of  the  memory  that  came  to  me  so 
unexpectedly  at  the  library.  This  sud- 
den thought  opened  up  to  me  the  full 
consciousness  of  a  real  life,  a  wise  sim- 
plicity, the  freedom  of  man  amid  a 
nature  of  which  he  is  the  master. 

Not  that  I  consider  as  such  the  life 


OBERMANN        63 

that  I  lead  here,  nor  think  that  in  the 
midst  of  my  rocks,  surrounded  by  the 
wretched  plains,  I  am  the  man  of  na- 
ture. .  .  .  But,  since  I  am  condemned 
ever  to  wait  for  life,  I  strive  to  vege- 
tate alone  and  in  solitude.  .  .  . 

May  I  once  again,  beneath  the  au- 
tumn sky,  in  the  last  of  the  beautiful 
days  that  are  filled  with  the  mystery  of 
the  mist,  seated  by  the  side  of  the  stream 
that  carries  the  yellowed  leaf  upon  its 
current,  —  may  I  listen  to  the  deep  and 
simple  notes  of  an  artless  melody.  May 
I  one  day,  as  I  climb  the  Grimsel  or  the 
Titlis,  alone  with  the  man  of  the  moun- 
tains, listen,  while  lying  near  the  snows 
upon  the  close-cut  grass,  to  the  famil- 
iar and  romantic  sounds  of  the  cows  of 
Unterwalden  and  of  Hasli ;  and  once 
before  I  die,  may  I  there  say  to  a  man 
who  can  understand  me  :  Had  we  but 
lived  ! 


64        OBERMANN 


LETTER  XI I I 

Fontainebleau,  July  3 1st,  2d  year. 

WHEN  an  irresistible  feeling 
carries  us  far  beyond  the 
things  that  are  ours,  and  fills  us  first 
with  rapture,  then  with  regret,  giving  us 
a  vision  of  blessings  which  are  beyond 
our  reach,  this  deep  and  fleeting  sense 
is  but  the  inner  proof  of  the  superiority 
of  our  faculties  over  our  destiny.  And 
for  this  very  reason  it  lingers  but  for  a 
while,  and  is  soon  changed  to  regret ; 
it  is  enchanting,  then  heartrending. 
Dejection  follows  every  immoderate 
impulse.  We  suffer  for  not  being  what 
we  might  be  ;  but  were  we  to  find  our- 
selves in  that  order  of  things  for  which 
we  long,  we  should  no  longer  have 
either  that  excess  of  desire  or  that 
redundance  of  faculties ;  we  should  no 
longer  enjoy  the  delight  of  being  above 


OBERMANN        65 

our  destiny,  greater  than  our  environ- 
ment, more  productive  than  we  have 
need  to  be.  Were  we  to  be  in  posses- 
sion of  those  delights  which  our  im- 
agination had  so  ardently  pictured,  we 
should  be  found  cold,  often  dreamy, 
indifferent,  even  wearied ;  because  we 
cannot  produce  beyond  our  possibil- 
ities ;  because  we  should  then  feel  the 
irresistible  limits  of  our  human  nature, 
and,  in  employing  our  faculties  on  the 
things  of  actual  life,  they  would  no 
longer  be  at  our  service  to  bear  us  be- 
yond, into  the  imaginary  region  of  the 
ideal  brought  into  subjection  to  the 
sovereignty  of  actual  man. 

But  why  should  these  things  be 
purely  ideal  ?  This  is  what  I  cannot 
understand.  Why  does  the  non-existent 
seem  more  in  accord  with  man's  nature 
than  what  exists  ?  Actual  life  is  also 
like  a  dream ;  it  has  no  whole,  no 
continuity,  no  end ;  it  has  elements 
that  are  positive  and  settled ;  it  has 


66        OBERMANN 

others  that  are  nought  but  chance  and 
dissonance,  that  pass  like  shadows,  and 
hold  nothing  but  deceptive  illusions. 
Thus,  in  sleep,  we  think  of  things  true 
and  connected,  and  of  things  strange, 
disconnected,  and  chimeric,  all  united 
by  some  indefinable  link.  The  same 
medley  forms  the  dreams  of  the  night 
and  the  sentiments  of  the  day.  It  has 
been  said,  by  the  wisdom  of  the  an- 
cients, that  the  moment  of  awakening 
will  come  at  last. 


LETTER   XIV 

Fontainebleau,  August  Jth,  2d  year. 

MR.  W ,  whom  you  know, 
said  recently:  "When  I  take 
my  cup  of  coffee,  I  arrange  the  world 
to  my  liking."  I,  too,  indulge  in  this 
kind  of  dream  ;  and  when  my  path  lies 
through  the  heather,  between  the  dew- 
covered  junipers,  I  find  myself  pictur- 


OBERMANN        67 

ing  the  lot  of  happy  men.  I  fully  be- 
lieve that  men  might  be  happy.  It  is 
not  my  wish  to  create  another  species, 
or  a  new  earth ;  it  is  not  my  desire  to 
make  a  widespread  reform.  That  kind 
of  hypothesis  leads  to  nothing,  you  de- 
clare, because  it  is  not  based  on  actual 
life.  Then  let  us  take  what  necessarily 
exists;  let  us  take  it  as  it  is,  arranging 
merely  those  things  that  are  accidental. 
I  have  no  longing  for  new  or  visionary 
species  ;  my  materials  lie  within  my 
reach,  and  with  them  I  form  my  plan 
after  my  own  ideal. 

I  want  two  things  :  a  settled  climate, 
and  sincere  men.  If  I  know  when 
the  rain  will  overflow  the  rivers,  when 
the  sun  will  scorch  my  plants,  when  the 
hurricane  will  shake  my  cottage,  it  is 
the  part  of  my  industry  to  battle  with 
the  forces  of  nature  that  are  arrayed 
against  my  needs.  But  when  I  am 
ignorant  of  the  coming  event,  when 
misfortune  crushes  me  while  I  am  still 


68        OBERMANN 

unwarned  of  danger,  when  prudence 
may  be  my  ruin,  and  the  interests  of 
others  confided  to  my  care  forbid  un- 
concern and  even  a  sense  of  security,  is 
not  my  life,  of  necessity,  both  restless 
and  sorrowful  ?  Is  it  not  inevitable  that 
inaction  follows  in  the  train  of  forced 
labor,  and  that  I  should  consume  my 
days,  as  Voltaire  has  so  well  said,  in  the 
convulsions  of  unrest  or  in  the  lethargy 
of  weariness  ? 

If  almost  all  men  are  deceitful,  if 
the  duplicity  of  some  forces  others  at 
least  into  the  refuge  of  reserve,  does 
it  not  follow  that  to  the  inevitable 
wrongs  against  their  fellows,  commit- 
ted by  some  men  in  their  own  interests, 
is  added  a  far  larger  share  of  useless 
wrongs  ?  Does  it  not  follow  that  men 
injure  one  another  without  intent,  that 
each  one  is  watchful  and  guarded,  that 
enemies  are  inventive,  and  friends  are 
prudent?  Is  it  not  inevitable  that  an 
honest  man  should  fall  in  public  esti- 


OBERMANN        69 

mation  by  an  indiscreet  remark  or  a 
false  judgment;  that  an  enmity  born  of 
a  baseless  suspicion  should  grow  to  be 
mortal;  that  those  who  would  have 
wished  to  do  well  are  discouraged  ;  that 
false  principles  are  established ;  that 
craftiness  is  of  more  use  than  wisdom, 
valor,  or  magnanimity  ;  that  children 
reproach  their  father  for  not  having 
been  a  trickster,  and  that  states  perish 
for  not  having  committed  a  crime  ?  In 
this  state  of  endless  uncertainty,  I  ask 
what  becomes  of  morality ;  and  in  the 
uncertainty  of  things,  what  becomes  of 
security ;  and  without  security,  with- 
out morality,  I  ask  if  happiness  is  not 
a  child's  dream  ?  .  „  . 

A  settled  climate,  and  men  sincere, 
unmistakably  sincere,  is  all  I  require. 
I  am  happy  if  I  am  sure  of  things.  I 
leave  to  the  heavens  its  storms  and  its 
thunderbolts ;  to  the  earth,  its  mire 
and  its  dryness ;  to  the  soil,  its  steril- 
ity ;  to  our  bodies,  their  weakness,  their 


7o         OBERMANN 

degeneration;  to  men,  their  differences 
and  incompatibilities,  their  faithless- 
ness, their  errors,  their  vices  even, 
and  their  necessary  egoism ;  to  time,  its 
slowness  and  irrevocableness.  The  city 
of  my  dreams  is  happy,  if  life  is  or- 
dered, and  thought  undisguised.  The 
only  added  element  it  requires  is  a 
good  government ;  and  this  cannot  fail 
her,  if  thought  is  unconcealed. 


LETTER    XV 

Fontainebleau,  August  yth,  2d  year. 

THE  day  was  at  its  close ;  there 
was  no  moon  ;  there  was  no  stir; 
the  sky  was  calm,  the  trees  motionless. 
A  few  insects  under  the  grass,  a  solitary 
bird  singing,  far  away,  in  the  warmth 
of  the  evening.  I  lingered  long,  at  rest 
upon  the  ground;  my  mind  seemed  rilled 
with  indistinct  ideas.  My  thoughts 
wandered  over  the  earth  and  the 


OBERMANN        71 

centuries ;  I  shuddered  at  the  work  of 
man.  I  came  back  to  myself,  and  saw 
myself  in  this  chaos;  I  saw  my  life 
lost  in  its  depths ;  I  foresaw  the  future 
ages  of  the  world.  Rocks  of  the  Righi ! 
had  your  chasms  been  there  ! 

Already  the  night  was  gloomy. 
Slowly  I  left  the  spot ;  I  wandered  at 
random,  I  was  filled  with  weariness.  I 
had  need  of  tears,  but  could  only  groan. 
The  early  days  have  passed  away  ;  I  feel 
the  torments  of  youth,  but  no  longer 
have  its  consolations.  My  heart,  still 
wasted  by  the  fire  of  an  immature  and 
profitless  age,  is  withered  and  parched 
as  though  it  had  reached  the  exhaustion 
of  the  age  that  has  outlived  passion. 
My  life  is  dead,  but  I  am  not  calm. 
Some  men  enjoy  their  sufferings,  but 
for  me  all  things  have  passed  away  ;  I 
have  neither  joy,  nor  hope,  nor  rest ; 
nothing  is  left  to  me,  not  even  tears. 


72        OBERMANN 


LETTER   XVI 

Fontainebleau,  August  I2th,  2d  year. 

WHAT  noble  sentiments !  What 
memories  !  What  quiet  ma- 
jesty in  a  night  soft,  calm,  luminous ! 
What  grandeur !  But  the  soul  is  over- 
whelmed with  doubt.  It  sees  that  the 
feelings  aroused  by  sentient  things  lead 
it  into  error ;  that  truth  exists,  but  in 
the  far  distance.  Nature  seems  incom- 
prehensible at  sight  of  those  mighty 
planets  in  the  changeless  sky. 

Such  permanence  is  bewildering ;  it 
is  to  man  a  fearful  eternity.  All  things 
pass  away ;  man  passes  away,  but  the 
worlds  do  not  pass !  Thought  is  lost 
in  a  gulf  between  the  changes  of  the 
earth  and  the  immutability  of  the 
heavens. 


OBERMANN        73 


LETTER  XVII 


FontainebleaUy  August  i^.thy  2d  year. 

1GO  to  the  woods  before  the  com- 
ing of  the  sun  ;  I  see  it  rise  in  a 
cloudless  sky  ;  I  walk  in  the  dew-cov- 
ered brakes,  in  the  midst  of  the  bram- 
bles, among  the  hinds,  under  the 
birches  of  Mont  Chauvet.  A  sense  of 
the  happiness  that  might  have  been 
takes  full  possession  of  me,  drives  me 
onward,  and  overpowers  me.  I  climb, 
I  descend,  I  press  on  like  a  man  longing 
for  joy  ;  then  a  sigh,  discontent,  and  a 
whole  day  of  wretchedness. 


74        OBERMANN 


LETTER   XVIII 

Fontainebleau,  August  ifth,  2d  year. 

EVEN  here  I  love  only  the  even- 
ing. The  dawn  delights  me  for 
a  moment ;  it  seems  as  though  I  should 
feel  its  beauty,  but  the  day  which  is  to 
follow  in  its  train  must  be  so  long  !  .  .  . 
Here,  nothing  crushes  me,  nothing 
satisfies  me.  I  even  believe  that  my 
weariness  is  on  the  increase ;  it  is  be- 
cause I  do  not  suffer  enough.  Am  I, 
then,  happier  ?  Ah,  no  ;  suffering  and 
unhappiness  are  not  the  same ;  neither 
are  enjoyment  and  happiness. 

My  lot  is  easy,  but  my  life  is  sad.  I 
am  in  the  best  of  surroundings :  free, 
tranquil,  well,  without  cares,  indiffer- 
ent towards  the  future,  from  which  I 
expect  nothing,  and  drifting  away 
without  regret  from  the  past,  which 
has  brought  me  no  joy.  But  I  am  filled 


OBERMANN        75 

with  an  unrest  that  will  never  leave 
me ;  it  is  a  craving  I  do  not  compre- 
hend, which  overrules  me,  absorbs  me, 
lifts  me  above  the  things  that  perish. 
.  .  .  You  are  mistaken,  and  I  too  was 
once  mistaken  ;  it  is  not  the  desire  for 
love.  A  great  distance  lies  between  the 
void  that  fills  my  heart  and  the  love 
that  I  have  so  deeply  desired ;  but  the 
infinite  stretches  between  what  I  am 
and  what  I  crave  to  be.  Love  is  vast, 
but  it  is  not  the  infinite.  I  do  not  desire 
enjoyment ;  I  long  for  hope,  I  crave 
knowledge !  I  need  endless  illusions, 
which  shall  ever  lure  me  onwards,  and 
ever  deceive  me.  What  do  I  care  for 
things  that  will  cease  to  be  ?  The  hour 
that  will  come  in  sixty  years  is  near 
me  now.  I  have  no  liking  for  what 
is  prearranged,  for  what  approaches, 
arrives,  and  is  then  no  more.  I  desire 
a  good,  a  dream,  a  hope,  that  shall  be 
ever  before  me,  beyond  me,  greater 
even  than  my  expectation,  greater  than 


76        OBERMANN 

what  passes  away.  I  should  like  to  be 
pure  intelligence,  and  I  wish  that  the 
eternal  order  of  the  world.  .  .  .  And 
thirty  years  ago  the  order  was,  and  I 
was  not! 


LETTER    XIX 

Fontainebleau,  August  i8th,  2d  year. 

THERE  are  moments  when  I  am 
filled  with  hope  and  a  sense  of 
liberty ;  time  and  things  pass  before 
me  with  majestic  harmony,  and  I  feel 
happy,  as  though  happiness  were  pos- 
sible to  me.  I  have  surprised  myself  re- 
turning to  my  early  years ;  once  more 
I  have  found  in  the  rose  the  beauty 
of  delight,  and  its  celestial  eloquence. 
Happy !  I  ?  And  yet  I  am,  and  happy 
to  overflowing,  like  one  who  reawak- 
ens from  the  terrors  of  a  dream  to  a 
life  of  peace  and  liberty  ;  like  one  who 
emerges  from  the  filth  of  a  dungeon, 


OBERMANN        77 

and,  after  ten  years,  looks  once  again 
upon  the  serenity  of  the  sky;  happy 
like  the  man  who  loves  the  woman  he 
has  saved  from  death  !  But  the  mo- 
ment passes ;  a  cloud  drifts  across  the 
sun  and  shuts  out  its  inspiring  light; 
the  birds  are  hushed ;  the  growing  dark- 
ness drives  away  both  my  dream  and 
my  joy.  .  .  . 


LETTER    XX 

Fontainebleau,  August  2fth,  2d  year. 

HOW  few  are  the  needs  of  the 
individual  who  desires  only  to 
exist,  and  how  many  are  those  of  the 
man  who  wishes  to  live  happily  and 
usefully.  If  a  man  were  strong  enough 
to  renounce  joy,  and  realize  that  it  is 
beyond  his  reach,  he  would  be  far  hap- 
pier ;  but  must  one  live  forever  alone  ? 
Peace  itself  is  a  sad  blessing  when  there 
is  no  hope  of  sharing  it. 


78        OBERMANN 

I  know  that  there  are  many  who  care 
for  nothing  more  lasting  than  the  good 
of  the  moment ;  and  that  others  know 
how  to  limit  themselves  to  a  manner  of 
life  without  order  and  devoid  of  taste. 
.  .  .  Such  a  life  is  called  a  simple  life. 
I  call  it  an  unfortunate  life,  if  it  is 
temporary  ;  a  life  of  misery,  if  it  is  ne- 
cessary and  enduring  ;  but  if  it  is  vol- 
untary, if  it  is  not  distasteful,  if  it  is 
the  accepted  life  of  the  future,  then  I 
call  it  a  life  worthy  of  ridicule. 

Contempt  of  riches  is  a  beautiful 
sentiment  when  expressed  in  books ; 
but  one  who  has  a  family  and  no  money 
must  be  either  callous,  or  endowed 
with  resolute  strength;  and  I  question 
whether  a  man  of  high  character  would 
submit  to  such  a  life.  One  endures 
whatever  is  accidental ;  but  to  forever 
bow  one's  will  before  misery  is  to  adopt 
misery.  Are  such  stoics  wanting,  per- 
haps, in  that  sense  of  propriety  which 
teaches  man  that  a  life  of  this  kind 


OBERMANN        79 

is  unworthy  of  his  nature  ?  Their  sim- 
plicity, without  order,  without  delicacy, 
without  shame,  approaches  nearer,  it 
seems  to  me,  to  the  gross  penitence  of 
a  fakir  than  to  the  strength  and  indif- 
ference of  a  philosopher. 

There  is  a  propriety,  a  care,  a  har- 
mony, a  completeness,  even  in  simpli- 
city. .  .  . 


LETTER    XXI 

Fontainebleau,  September  fsf,  2d  year. 

THE  days  are  beautiful,  and  I  am 
filled  with  profound  peace.  In 
times  past,  I  should  have  enjoyed  with 
keener  zest  this  full  liberty,  this  relin- 
quishment  of  all  business,  of  all  pro- 
jects, this  complete  indifference  to 
events. 

I  begin  to  feel  that  I  am  advancing 
in  life.  Those  exquisite  impressions, 
those  sudden  emotions  which  stirred 


8o        OBERMANN 

me  once  so  deeply,  and  carried  me  so 
far  beyond  this  world  of  sadness,  are 
now  all  changed  and  weakened.  That 
longing,  awakened  in  me  by  the  feel- 
ing for  every  beauty  which  exists  in  the 
natural  world,  that  hope  so  uncertain 
and  so  full  of  charm,  that  celestial  fire 
which  dazzles  and  consumes  the  heart 
of  youth,  that  all-embracing  rapture 
which  sheds  a  light  over  the  vast  illu- 
sion—  all  these  have  passed  away. 

You  who  know  the  limitless  cravings 
of  my  nature  tell  me  what  I  shall  do 
with  my  life,  when  I  shall  have  lost 
those  moments  of  illusion  which  shone 
in  the  darkness,  like  tempest-gleams  on 
a  stormy  night !  They  made  life  more 
sombre,  it  is  true ;  but  they  were  an 
earnest  that  it  might  change,  and  that 
the  light  still  burned.  .  .  . 

I  was  far  different  in  those  days 
when  it  was  possible  for  me  to  love. 
I  had  been  romantic  in  my  childhood, 
and  even  then  pictured  a  retreat  to  my 


OBERMANN        81 

taste.  .  .  .  The  word  Chartreuse  had 
impressed  me,  and  there,  near  Greno- 
ble, I  built  the  house  of  my  dreams.  I 
then  believed  that  pleasant  places  went 
far  to  make  a  happy  life ;  and  there, 
with  the  woman  I  loved,  I  felt  that  the 
changeless  joy,  for  which  my  baffled 
heart  had  ardently  longed,  might  at 
last  be  mine.  ... 

The  farther  I  look  back  into  my 
youth,  the  deeper  are  the  impressions 
I  find.  If  I  pass  beyond  the  age  when 
ideas  begin  to  have  some  breadth  ;  if  I 
seek  in  my  childhood  for  the  earliest 
fancies  of  a  melancholy  heart,  which 
never  had  a  true  childhood,  and  was 
intent  upon  strong  emotions  and  un- 
usual things  at  a  time  when  a  love  or 
a  distaste  for  play  was  scarcely  devel- 
oped —  if  I  look  back  to  my  experi- 
ences at  seven  years,  at  six  years,  at 
five  years,  I  find  impressions  as  endur- 
ing, more  confiding,  sweeter  than  than 
those  of  later  days,  and  shaped  by  those 


82        OBERMANN 

complete    illusions   which   have    been 
the  happiness  of  no  other  age.  .  .  . 

September  2d. 

.  .  .  Prettiness  amuses  the  mind, 
beauty  sustains  the  soul,  sublimity 
astounds  or  exalts  it ;  but  the  beauties 
that  captivate  and  impassion  the  heart 
are  broader  and  more  undefined,  rare, 
beyond  comprehension,  mysterious,  and 
ineffable. 

Thus,  love  makes  all  things  beauti- 
ful to  hearts  capable  of  loving,  and 
adds  a  sense  of  exquisiteness  to  their 
feeling  for  everything  in  nature.  Cre- 
ating as  it  does  in  us  the  noblest  of 
all  possible  relationships  outside  of 
ourselves,  it  opens  to  us  the  conscious- 
ness of  every  relationship,  of  all  har- 
monies ;  it  unveils  a  new  world  to  our 
affections.  Swept  along  by  this  swift 
current,  fascinated  by  this  power  which 
holds  immeasurable  promise,  and  of 
which  nothing  has  as  yet  disillusioned 


OBERMANN        83 

us,  we  seek,  we  feel,  we  love,  we  desire 
all  that  nature  holds  in  fee  for  man.  . .  . 


LETTER    XXII 

Fontainebleau,  October  12  th,  2d  year. 

1  LONGED  to  see  once  more  all  the 
places  through  which  I  loved  to 
wander  in  the  past.  Before  the  nights 
grow  cold,  before  the  trees  lose  their 
leaves,  before  the  birds  take  wing,  I 
am  exploring  the  most  distant  parts  of 
the  forest. 

Yesterday  I  was  on  my  way  before 
the  break  of  day ;  the  moon  still  shone, 
and  the  dawn  had  not  yet  dispelled  the 
shadows.  The  valley  of  Changis  still 
lay  in  the  shades  of  night ;  but  I  had 
already  gained  the  heights  of  Avon.18 
I  descended  to  the  Basses-Loges,  and 
reached  Valvin  as  the  sun,  rising  be- 
hind Samoreau,  colored  the  rocks  of 
Samois.19 


84        OBERMANN 

Valvin  is  not  a  village,  and  has  no 
cultivated  land.  The  inn  stands  soli- 
tary, at  the  foot  of  a  hill,  on  a  small, 
level  strand,  between  the  river  and  the 
woods.  Valvin  or  Thomery 20  may  be 
reached  by  water,  in  the  evening,  when 
the  shores  are  sombre,  and  we  hear  the 
belling  of  the  stags  in  the  forest ;  or 
else,  at  the  rising  of  the  sun,  when  the 
earth  is  still  at  rest,  when  the  boatman's 
cry  startles  the  roes,  and  echoes  under 
the  high  poplars  and  through  the  heath- 
covered  hills  all  steaming  in  the  early 
break  of  day.  .  .  . 

Then  I  turned  to  the  west,  in  search 
of  the  spring  of  Mont  Chauvet  .  .  . 
and  descended  into  the  quiet  valley 
where  its  waters  are  lost  without  form- 
ing a  stream.  In  turning  aside,  to- 
wards the  cross  of  the  Grand- Veneur,21 
I  came  upon  a  solitude  as  austere  as  the 
wilderness  that  I  am  seeking.  I  passed 
behind  the  rocks  of  Cuvier;  I  was  rilled 
with  sadness;  I  lingered  long  among 


OBERMANN        85 

the  gorges  of  Apremont.22  Towards 
evening  I  reached  the  solitudes  of  the 
Grand-Franchard,23  an  ancient  monas- 
tery standing  alone  among  the  hills 
and  the  sands ;  .  .  .  the  moon  shone 
faintly  as  if  to  add  to  the  solitude  of 
this  deserted  monument.  Not  a  sound, 
not  a  bird,  not  a  movement  stirred  the 
silence  of  the  night.  But,  when  all 
that  oppresses  us  is  at  rest,  when  all 
things  sleep  and  leave  us  to  repose, 
then  phantoms  hold  watch  in  our  own 
hearts. 

The  next  day  I  turned  to  the  south, 
and,  as  I  wandered  among  the  hills, 
I  watched  with  delight  the  gathering 
of  a  storm.  I  found  an  easy  shelter  in 
the  hollows  of  the  overhanging  cliffs. 
From  the  depths  of  my  retreat,  I  loved 
to  see  the  junipers  and  the  birches 
wrestling  with  the  strength  of  the 
winds,  while  their  roots  were  crowded 
within  a  small  and  arid  space  ;  I  loved 
to  see  them  hold  their  poor  and  inde- 


86        OBERMANN 

pendent  life,  while  their  only  support 
was  the  face  of  the  rocks,  in  the  clefts 
of  which  they  stood  balanced,  and  their 
only  nourishment  a  handful  of  moist 
earth,  caught  in  the  crevices  into  which 
their  roots  had  crept. 

When  the  rain  had  lessened,  I 
plunged  into  the  wet  woods,  which 
were  clothed  with  fresh  beauty.  I 
followed  the  edge  of  the  forest  near 
Recloses,24  la  Vignette,  and  Bourron. 
Towards  evening,  I  turned  my  steps 
homeward  with  regret,  and  felt  well 
pleased  with  my  walk,  if  anything  can 
give  me  a  sense  of  pleasure  or  of  re- 
gret. 

I  care  no  longer  for  desires ;  they  do 
not  deceive  me.  Not  that  I  wish  them 
to  die,  for  such  absolute  silence  would 
seem  more  sinister  still.  But  they  are 
like  the  vain  beauty  of  the  rose  which 
blooms  before  eyes  that  have  closed : 
they  hold  up  before  me  what  I  can 
never  possess,  what  I  can  scarcely  see. 


OBERMANN        87 

If  hope  seems  still  to  throw  a  ray  of 
light  into  the  night  which  envelops 
me,  it  heralds  nought  but  the  bitterness 
that  is  her  last  bequest  before  she  dies  ; 
it  illumines  only  the  depths  of  the  void 
where  I  sought,  and  found  nothing. 

Soft  climates,  beautiful  places,  the 
sky  of  the  night,  significant  sounds, 
early  memories  ;  times,  opportunities ; 
nature,  beautiful  and  expressive;  sub- 
lime affections  —  all  have  passed  before 
me,  all  allure  me,  and  all  abandon  me. 
I  am  alone ;  the  strength  of  my  heart 
is  not  given  out,  it  reacts  on  itself,  it 
waits.  I  am  here  in  the  world,  a  wan- 
derer, solitary  in  the  midst  of  a  people 
for  whom  I  care  nothing ;  like  a  man, 
deaf  for  many  years,  whose  eager  eyes 
gaze  upon  the  crowd  of  silent  beings 
who  move  and  pass  before  him.  He 
sees  everything,  but  everything  is  with- 
held from  him  ;  he  divines  the  sounds 
that  he  loves,  he  seeks  them,  and  hears 
them  not ;  he  suffers  the  silence  of  all 

• 


88        OBERMANN 

things  in  the  midst  of  the  noise  of  the 
world.  Everything  passes  before  him, 
but  he  can  grasp  nothing ;  universal 
harmony  reigns  in  external  creation,  it 
is  in  his  imagination,  but  is  not  in  his 
heart ;  he  is  apart  from  the  entirety  of 
beings,  no  bond  unites  him  to  them ; 
in  vain  do  all  things  exist  around  him, 
he  lives  alone,  he  is  isolated  in  the 
midst  of  the  living  world. 


LETTER  XXIII 

FontainebleaUy  October  f8thy  2d  year. 

WILL  it  also  be  given  unto  man 
to  know  the  long  peace  of  au- 
tumn, after  the  unrest  of  the  strength 
of  his  years,  even  as  the  fire,  after  its 
haste  to  be  consumed,  lingers  before  it 
is  quenched  ? 

Long  before  the  equinox,  the  leaves 
had  fallen  in  quantities,  yet  the  forest 
still  holds  much  of  its  verdure  and  all 


OBERMANN        89 

of  its  beauty.  More  than  forty  days  ago 
everything  looked  as  though  it  would 
end  before  its  time,  and  now  all  things 
are  enduring  beyond  their  allotted  days; 
receiving,  at  the  very  door  of  destruc- 
tion, a  lengthened  life,  which  lingers 
on  the  threshold  of  its  decay  with 
abundant  grace  or  security,  and  seems 
to  borrow,  as  it  weakens  with  gentle 
loitering,  both  from  the  repose  of  ap- 
proaching death  and  from  the  charm 
of  departing  life. 


LETTER  XXIV 

Fontainebleau,  October  28  th,  2d year. 

THE  frosts  depart,  and  I  give  no 
heed ;  spring  dies,  and  I  am  not 
moved ;  summer  passes,  and  I  feel  no 
regret.    But  I  take  delight  in  walking 
over  the  fallen  leaves,  on  the  last  of  the 
beautiful  days,  in  the  unclothed  forest. 
Whence  come  to  man  the  most  last- 


90        OBERMANN 

ing  of  the  delights  of  his  heart,  that 
rapture  of  sadness,  that  charm  full  of 
secrets,  which  make  him  live  on  his 
sorrows  and  be  still  content  with  him- 
self in  the  midst  of  the  sense  of  his 
ruin  ?  I  cling  to  the  happy  season  that 
will  soon  have  passed  away;  a  belated 
interest,  a  contradictory  delight,  draws 
me  to  her  as  she  is  about  to  die.  The 
same  moral  law  which  makes  the  idea 
of  destruction  painful  to  me,  makes  me 
also  love  the  sentiment  of  it  in  the 
things  of  this  world  that  must  pass  away 
before  me.  It  is  natural  that  we  should 
more  fully  enjoy  the  life  which  perishes, 
when,  conscious  of  its  frailty,  we  feel 
that  it  still  lives  on  within  us.  When 
death  separates  us  from  things,  they 
subsist  without  us.  But  when  the  leaves 
fall,  vegetation  is  at  an  end,  and  dies ; 
while  we  live  on  for  new  generations. 
Autumn  is  full  of  delight,  because,  for 
us,  spring  is  yet  to  come. 

Spring  is  more  beautiful  in  nature ; 


OBERMANN        91 

but  man,  by  his  works,  has  made  au- 
tumn sweeter.  The  awakening  green, 
the  singing  bird,  the  opening  flower, 
and  that  fire  which  returns  to  give 
strength  to  life,  and  the  shadows  which 
shield  those  hidden  retreats,  and  that 
luxuriant  grass,  that  wild  fruit,  those 
soft  nights  which  invite  to  liberty !  Sea- 
son of  joy  !  You  fill  me  with  dread  in 
my  burning  unrest.  I  find  deeper  re- 
pose towards  the  eve  of  the  year ;  the 
season  when  all  things  seem  to  die  is 
the  only  time  when  I  sleep  in  peace  on 
the  earth  of  man. 


LETTER   XXV 

FontainebleaUy  November  6thy  2d year. 

I  LEAVE  my  woods ;  I  had  intended 
to  stay  here  through  the  winter,  but 
if  I  want  to  free  myself  from  the  busi- 
ness which  brought  me  within  reach  of 
Paris,  I  must  neglect  it  no  longer.  .  .  . 


92         OBERMANN 

So  I  shall  leave  the  forest,  its  life,  its 
dreamy  ways,  and  the  peaceful  4hough 
imperfect  image  of  a  free  land. 


LETTER  XXX 

Paris.,  March  fth,  jd  year. 

IT  was  gloomy  and  cold ;  I  was 
heavy-hearted ;  I  walked  because 
I  could  do  nothing  else.  I  passed  near 
some  flowers,  which  grew  on  a  wall  at 
arm's  height.  A  daffodil  wa^  in  bloom, 
the  most  perfect  expression  of  longing, 
the  first  fragrance  of  the  year.  I  was 
filled  with  a  sense  of  all  the  joy  to 
which  man  is  heir.  That  ineffable 
harmony  of  beings,  the  image  of  the 
ideal  world,  took  possessioa  of  me ; 
never  before  had  I  experienced  an 
emotion  so  instantaneous,  and  so  full 
of  grandeur. 

I  know  not  what  form,  what  ana- 
logy, what  secret  affinity  led  me  to  see 


OBERMANN        93 

in  this  flower  a  measureless  beauty,  the 
expression,  the  elegance,  the  attitude  of 
a  happy  and  simple  woman  in  all  the 
grace  and  splendor  of  awakening  love. 
I  shall  not  strive  to  render  that  power, 
that  immensity  which  nothing  can  ex- 
press ;  that  form  which  nothing  can 
contain ;  that  idea  of  a  better  world 
which  we  feel,  but  which  nature  can- 
not have  given  us  ;  that  celestial  ray 
which  we  think  to  grasp,  which  im- 
passions us,  leads  us  on,  and  is  nought 
but  an  invisible,  wandering  spirit,  stray- 
ing in  the  dark  abyss. 

But  this  spirit,  this  image,  touched 
with  a  mysterious  beauty,  mighty  with 
the  magic  power  of  the  unknown, 
which  has  become  needful  to  us  in  the 
midst  of  our  miseries,  and  has  grown 
natural  to  our  overburdened  hearts,  — 
where  is  the  man  who  can  see  it  even 
for  a  moment,  dimly,  and  ever  forget 
the  vision  ? 

When  the  opposition,  the  inertia  of 


94        OBERMANN 

a  power  dead,  brutal,  unclean,  fetters 
us,  envelops  us,  imprisons  us,  holds  us 
plunged  in  uncertainties,  loathing,  puer- 
ilities, imbecile  or  cruel  follies  ;  when 
we  know  nothing,  possess  nothing ; 
when  all  things  pass  before  us  like  the 
whimsical  figures  of  an  odious  and  ab- 
surd dream,  —  what  can  repress  in  our 
hearts  the  longing  for  a  different  order 
of  things,  for  another  nature  ? 


LETTER  XXXII 

Paris,  April  2Qth,  jd  year. 

A  SHORT  while  ago,  at  the  Biblio- 
tfoque,  I  heard  some  one  near  me 
address  by  name  the  famous  L.  .  .  . 
At  another  time  I  happened  to  be  sit- 
ting at  the  same  table  with  him  ;  .  .  . 
he  gave  me  some  idyls,  written  by  an 
obscure  Greek  author,  which  he  had 
found  in  an  old  Latin  manuscript. 


' 

.,      ' 


•  - 
•» 


OBERMANN        95 


LETTER    XXXIII 

Paris,  May  fthy  jd  year. 

THE  author  to  whom  I  referred 
in  my  last  letter  said  to  me  yes- 
terday, "  If  I  mistake  not,  my  idyls 
do  not  interest  you  greatly.  Possibly 
you  would  prefer  a  moral  or  philoso- 
phic fragment,  attributed  to  Aristippus, 
spoken  of  by  Varro,  and  afterwards  sup- 
posed to  have  been  lost.  But,  as  it  was 
translated  in  the  fifteenth  century  into 
contemporary  French,  it  must  have  been 
still  in  existence  at  that  time.  I  found 
it  in  manuscript,  at  the  end  of  an  un- 
used and  imperfect  copy  of  Plutarch, 
published  by  Amyot." 

I  acknowledged  that,  not  being  a 
scholar,  I  had  the  misfortune  to  pre- 
fer things  to  words,  and  was  far  more 
deeply  interested  in  the  sentiments  of 
Aristippus  than  in  an  eclogue,  were  it 
written  by  Bion  or  Theocritus. 


96        OBERMANN 

But,  in  my  opinion,  there  was  not 
sufficient  evidence  to  prove  that  Aris- 
tippus23  was  the  author  of  this  short 
fragment,  and  we  owe  it  to  his  mem- 
ory not  to  attribute  to  him  what  he 
would  perhaps  have  disclaimed.  If  he 
did  write  it,  then  the  famous  Greek, 
who  was  as  misjudged  as  Epicurus,  and 
was  supposed  to  have  been  effeminately 
voluptuous,  or  of  a  too  pliant  phi- 
losophy, really  possessed  that  severity 
which  is  exacted  by  prudence  and  or- 
der, the  only  severity  which  becomes 
a  man  born  for  enjoyment,  and  a  way- 
farer upon  the  earth. 

MANUAL    OF    PSEUSOPHANES 

"  Thou  hast  awakened  gloomy, 
downcast,  already  weary  of  the  hours 
that  have  just  begun.  Thou  hast  raised 
upon  life  the  glance  of  disgust ;  thou 
hast  found  her  vain,  dull ;  after  a  while 
thou  shalt  feel  her  to  be  more  endur- 
able. Will  she  then  have  changed  ? 


OBERMANN        97 

"  She  has  no  definite  shape.  All  the 
experience  of  man  is  in  his  heart ;  all 
his  knowledge  is  in  his  thought.  His 
whole  life  is  within  himself. 

"What  ruin  can  crush  thee  thus? 
What  canst  thou  lose  ?  Does  there 
exist  outside  of  thee  anything  that  is 
thine  ?  Of  what  account  is  that  which 
perisheth  ?  All  things  pass,  excepting 
justice,  which  is  hidden  beneath  the 
veil  of  mutable  things.  For  man  all  is 
vain,  unless  he  walks  with  an  even  and 
tranquil  step,  obedient  to  the  laws  of 
the  intelligence. 

"  Everything  is  in  a  ferment  around 
thee,  everything  holds  a  menace ;  if 
thou  givest  thyself  up  to  alarms,  thy 
anxieties  will  be  endless.  Thou  shalt 
not  possess  what  cannot  be  possessed, 
and  thou  shalt  lose  thy  life  which 
belonged  to  thee.  The  things  that 
happen  pass  away  forever.  They  are 
necessary  accidents,  generated  in  an 
endless  circle  ;  they  vanish  even  as  an 
unexpected  and  fleeting  shadow. 


98        OBERMANN 

"  What  are  thy  ills  ?  Fanciful  fears, 
hypothetical  needs,  passing  vexations. 
Impotent  slave  !  Thou  cleavest  to  what 
does  not  exist ;  thou  art  the  servant  of 
shadows.  Leave  to  the  deluded  mul- 
titude whatsoever  is  illusive,  vain,  and 
mortal.  Give  heed  only  to  intelligence, 
which  is  the  principle  of  the  order  of 
the  world,  and  to  man  who  is  its  in- 
strument ;  intelligence  which  we  ought 
to  follow,  man  whom  we  ought  to  aid. 

"Intelligence  struggles  against  the 
opposition  of  matter,  against  those  blind 
laws  whose  invisible  results  have  been 
called  chance.  When  the  power  that 
has  been  given  thee  has  become  the 
handmaid  of  intelligence,  when  thou 
hast  added  thy  share  to  the  order  of  the 
world,  what  more  canst  thou  desire  ? 
Thou  hast  lived  in  accordance  with  thy 
nature  ;  and  what  is  better  for  the  be- 
ing who  is  endowed  with  feeling  and 
knowledge  than  to  exist  in  conformity 
with  his  own  nature  ? 


OBERMANN        99 

"  Each  day,  as  thou  art  born  to  a  new 
life,  remember  that  thou  hast  resolved 
not  to  walk  in  vain  upon  the  earth. 
The  world  advances  to  its  end.  But 
thou  dost  linger,  thou  dost  retrograde, 
thou  dost  remain  in  a  state  of  suspense 
and  languor.  Thy  days  that  have  passed, 
will  they  ever  return  at  a  better  time  ? 
The  whole  of  life  is  gathered  into  the 
present,26  which  thou  dost  neglect  in 
order  to  sacrifice  it  to  the  future ;  the 
present  is  time,  the  future  is  only  its 
semblance. 

"  Live  in  thyself,  and  seek  that  which 
perisheth  not.  Consider  the  desires  of 
our  thoughtless  passions ;  among  such 
a  throng,  is  there  one  which  is  suffi- 
cient unto  man  ?  Intelligence  finds,  in 
herself  alone,  food  for  her  life  ;  be  just 
and  strong.  No  one  can  know  the  day 
that  is  to  come ;  thou  wilt  not  find 
peace  in  outward  things,  seek  her  in 
thy  heart. 

"  Strength  is  the  law  of  nature,  and 


ioo      OBERMANN 

will  is  power ;  intensity  in  suffering  is 
better  than  apathy  in  gratification.  He 
who  obeys  and  suffers  is  often  greater 
than  he  who  enjoys  or  he  who  com- 
mands. Thy  fears  are  vain,  thy  desires 
are  vain.  One  thing  only  is  good  for 
thee  :  to  be  what  nature  has  ordained. 
"  Thou  art  intelligence  and  matter. 
So  also  is  the  world.  Harmony  trans- 
forms individuals,  and  the  whole  fol- 
lows the  road  to  perfection  through  the 
endless  improvement  of  its  different 
parts.  This  law  of  the  universe  is  also 
the  law  of  man. 

•  •«•••• 

"  Console,  enlighten,  and  support 
thy  fellows  ;  thy  part  has  been  marked 
out  by  the  place  thou  dost  fill  in  the 
immensity  of  living  beings.  Know  and 
obey  the  laws  of  man,  and  thou  wilt 
help  other  men  to  know  and  to  follow 
them.  Consider  and  show  them  the 
centre  and  the  end  of  things ;  let  them 
see  the  reason  of  what  surprises  them, 


OBERMANN       101 

the  instability  of  what  troubles  them, 
the  nothingness  of  what  sweeps  them 
along. 

"  Do  not  isolate  thyself  from  the 
entirety  of  the  world ;  keep  thine  eyes 
ever  fixed  upon  the  universe ;  and  re- 
member justice.  Thus  thou  wilt  have 
filled  the  measure  of  thy  life,  and  have 
accomplished  the  work  of  man." 


LETTER    XXXIV 


EXTRACTS  FROM  TWO  LETTERS 


Paris,  June  2d  and  flh,  ^d  year. 

1HAVE  seen,  within  a  few  days,  the 
difficult  part  of  Mahomet  played  by 
the  only  three  actors  who  are  capable 
of  attempting  it.  ... 

This  tragedy  of  Mahomet  is  one  of 
the  most  beautiful  plays  of  Voltaire  ; 
but  had  Voltaire  not  been  a  French- 
man he  might  not  have  made  the  con- 


102      OBERMANN 

quering  prophet  the  lover  of  Palmyra. 
It  is  true  that  the  love  of  Mahomet  is 
masculine,  imperious,  and  even  some- 
what fierce ;  he  does  not  love  as  Titus 
did,  but  it  might  have  been  better  had 
he  not  loved  at  all.  We  know  the  pas- 
sion of  Mahomet  for  women  ;  but  it  is 
likely  that  after  so  many  years  of  dis- 
simulation, of  retirement,  of  perils,  and 
of  triumphs,  the  passion  of  this  deep 
and  ambitious  heart  did  not  partake  of 
love. 

This  love  for  Palmyra  was  ill-suited 
to  his  high  destiny  and  his  genius. 
Love  is  out  of  place  in  a  stern  heart, 
filled  with  its  own  projects,  grown  old 
under  the  craving  for  authority,  know- 
ing pleasure  only  through  forgetfulness, 
and  for  which  happiness  itself  is  no- 
thing more  than  a  diversion. 

What  does  he  mean  by  exclaiming, 
" L 'amour  seul  me  console"?27  Who 
forced  him  to  seek  the  throne  of  the 
East,  to  leave  his  wives  and  his  obscure 


OBERMANN       103 

independence,  and  to  lift  the  censer,  the 
sceptre,  and  the  sword  ?  "  U  amour  seul 
me  console  !  "  To  rule  the  destiny  of  na- 
tions, to  change  the  religion  and  the 
laws  of  one  portion  of  the  globe,  to 
raise  up  Arabia  on  the  ruins  of  the 
world,  was  this  so  sad  a  life,  so  dull  a 
lethargy  ?  It  was,  doubtless,  a  difficult 
task,  but  it  was  the  very  occasion  not 
to  love.  These  cravings  of  the  heart 
have  their  spring  in  the  emptiness  of 
the  soul ;  he  who  has  great  things  to  do 
has  far  less  need  of  love.  .  .  . 

FIRST    FRAGMENT 

5th  year. 

I  question  whether  it  is  good  for  man, 
as  he  is,  to  be  invariably  happy,  without 
ever  having  struggled  against  adverse 
fate.  It  may  be  that  the  happy  man 
among  us  is  he  who  has  suffered  much, 
not  habitually  and  with  that  slow  at- 
rophy which  dulls  the  faculties,  but 
rather  with  an  intensity  which  excites 


104      OBERMANN 

the  secret  energy  of  the  soul  and  forces 
it,  happily,  to  seek  within  itself  re- 
sources of  which  it  had  been  before 
unconscious. 

It  is  a  gain  for  the  whole  of  life  to 
have  been  unhappy  at  the  age  when 
head  and  heart  begin  to  live.  It  is  the 
lesson  of  fate ;  it  shapes  good  men,  it 
enlarges  the  ideas,  and  it  matures  the 
heart  not  yet  weakened  by  old  age ;  it 
moulds  a  man  early  enough  in  his 
career  for  him  to  be  a  complete  man. 
Though  unhappiness  may  take  away 
pleasure  and  delight,  it  excites  the  sense 
of  order  and  the  desire  for  domestic 
joys ;  it  gives  the  greatest  satisfaction 
for  which  we  may  look,  that  of  ex- 
pecting nothing  more  than  a  calm  and 
useful  existence.  We  are  far  less  un- 
happy when  we  desire  merely  to  live ; 
we  are  nearer  to  usefulness  when,  in  the 
full  strength  of  life,  we  seek  nothing 
more  for  ourselves.  Misfortune  alone, 
I  believe,  has  the  power,  before  the 


OBERMANN       105 

coming  of  old  age,  to  thus  develop  the 
ordinary  man. 

True  goodness  exacts  wide  concep- 
tions, a  great  soul,  and  restrained  pas- 
sions. If  goodness  is  the  highest  merit 
of  man,  if  moral  perfections  are  essen- 
tial to  happiness,  it  is  among  those  who 
have  greatly  suffered  during  the  early 
years  of  the  heart's  life  that  we  shall 
find  the  men  who  are  most  fitly  framed 
for  their  own  good  and  for  the  good  of 
all  —  men  who  are  the  most  just,  the 
most  rational,  the  nearest  to  happiness, 
and  the  most  steadfastly  virtuous.  .  .  . 

The  upright  man  is  steadfast ;  he  has 
not  the  passions  of  any  faction,  nor  has 
he  the  habits  of  any  profession ;  he  is 
not  the  tool  of  any  man  ;  he  can  have 
neither  animosity,  nor  ostentation,  nor 
folly ;  he  is  not  surprised  at  goodness, 
because  it  exists  within  him,  or  at  evil, 
because  it  exists  in  nature  ;  he  is  indig- 
nant against  crime,  but  does  not  hate 
the  guilty;  he  despises  meanness  of 


io6      O  B  E  R  M  A  N  N 

soul,  but  is  not  angered  at  the  worm 
because  the  unfortunate  creature  has  no 
wings.  .  .  . 

He  is  virtuous,  not  because  he  is  a 
fanatic,  but  because  he  is  in  quest  of 
order ;  he  does  good  so  as  to  lessen  the 
uselessness  of  his  life ;  he  prefers  the 
happiness  of  others  to  his  own,  because 
others  can  enjoy,  and  he  cannot ;  he 
desires  merely  to  reserve  for  himself 
the  means  of  doing  some  good,  and  of 
living  in  peace ;  calm  is  the  necessary 
portion  of  those  who  do  not  look  for 
joy.  .  .  .  He  is  not  satisfied  with  what 
he  does,  because  he  feels  that  he  might 
do  far  better.  .  .  .  Thus  he  will  pass 
his  days,  while  drawing  ever  onward  to- 
ward the  highest  good ;  at  times  with 
an  energetic  but  hampered  step ;  oftener 
with  uncertainty,  with  some  weakness, 
with  the  smile  of  discouragement. 


OBERMANN       107 

It  is  a  small  thing  not  to  be  like  the 
common  type  of  men ;  but  it  is  a  step 
towards  wisdom  not  to  be  like  the  com- 
mon type  of  sages. 


LETTER    XXXVI 

Lyons,  A$ril  fth,  6th  year. 

SUPERB  mountains,  falling  of  the 
avalanches,  solitary  peace  of  the 
forest  glen,  yellow  leaves  floating  on 
the  silent  stream !  What  would  you 
be  to  man,  if  you  spoke  not  of  other 
men  ?  Nature  would  be  mute,  did  man 
no  longer  live.  Were  I  alone  upon  the 
earth,  what  would  I  care  for  the  sounds 
of  the  relentless  night,  the  solemn  si- 
lence of  the  great  valleys,  the  light  of 
the  sunset  in  a  sky  filled  with  melan- 
choly, above  the  calm  waters  ?  Nature 
is  felt  only  in  human  relationships, 
and  the  eloquence  of  things  is  nothing 
more  than  the  eloquence  of  man.  The 


io8       OBERMANN 

fruitful  earth,  the  broad  skies,  the  mov- 
ing waters,  are  but  an  expression  of  the 
relationship  that  our  hearts  create  and 
hold.  .  .  . 

But  the  relationships  of  human  life 
have  multiplied ;  the  friendship  of  the 
ancients  is  far  from  our  hearts,  or  from 
our  destiny. 

*    *    * 

Man  grows  old,  and  his  slighted 
heart  grows  old  before  him.  If  all 
that  he  can  love  is  in  man,  all  that  he 
must  shun  is  there  also.  Where  there 
are  many  social  conventionalities,  there, 
too,  of  stubborn  necessity,  are  many 
discords.  And  thus  the  man  whose 
fears  are  greater  than  his  hopes  lives 
apart  from  his  fellows.  Things  inani- 
mate have  less  power,  but  they  belong 
to  us  more  fully;  they  are  what  we 
make  them.  They  hold  less  of  what 
we  seek,  but  we  are  surer  of  finding 
the  things  that  they  contain.  They 


OBERMANN       109 

are  the  joys  of  mediocrity,  limited  but 
certain.  Passion  goes  in  quest  of  man, 
but  reason  is  sometimes  obliged  to  for- 
sake him  for  things  that  are  less  good 
and  less  fatal.  Thus  has  been  forged  a 
powerful  link  between  man  and  this 
friend  of  man. 


NOTES 


NOTE  i,  Page  vii 

'  I  **HE    following    is    a    list    of   Senancour's 

•*•      works :  — 

Reveries  sur  la  Nature  primitive  de  FHomme. 

Obermann. 

De  rumour. 

Libres  Meditations. 

Traditions  morales  et  religieuses. 

La  Chine. 

Republique  romaine. 

Empire  romain. 

De  Napoleon. 

Valombre,  comedie. 

Isabelle  a  Clemence. 

Observations  sur  le  Genie  du  Christianisme. 

Vocabulaire  de  simple  v'erite. 

France  litt'eraire. 

De  fatheisme  impute  a  Voltaire. 

VAmiti'e. 

Senancour  wrote,  in  addition,  a  number  of  politi- 
cal pamphlets,  letters,  and  articles ;  and  in  the  last 
years  of  his  life  he  began  a  work,  De  la  Religion 


H2  NOTES 

eternelle,  the  manuscript  of  which  was  lost.  He 
also  planned,  it  would  seem,  to  write  a  second 
part  to  Obermann. 

NOTE  2,  Page  3 

The  method  of  dating  the  letters  that  was 
used  in  the  last  French  edition,  and  that  was 
presumably  the  original  system  followed  by  Senan- 
cour,  has  been  strictly  adhered  to.  Although 
Obermann  was  written  during  three  years,  from 
1801  to  1803,  the  letters  were  made  to  cover 
apparently  a  period  of  nine  years. 

NOTE  3,  Page  3 

This  and  the  following  pages  refer  to  the 
time  when,  in  1789,  Senancour  fled  from  Paris 
and  took  refuge  in  Switzerland  in  order  to  avoid 
entering  the  priesthood,  to  which  his  father  had 
destined  him,  and  for  which  he  felt  an  uncon- 
querable aversion.  It  is  probable  that,  after  this, 
Senancour  saw  his  mother  only  at  rare  and  un- 
certain intervals  j  for  she  died  in  1796,  and  the 
French  Revolution,  which  broke  out  almost  imme- 
diately after  Senancour's  flight,  kept  him  an  exile 
in  Switzerland  for  many  years.  When  we  read 
his  tender  and  beautiful  words  about  his  mother, 
in  the  chapter  on  irreparable  faults  in  the  M'edita- 
tions,  we  feel  that  in  later  years  Senancour  deeply 
repented  his  hasty  act. 


NOTES  113 

NOTE  4,  Page  13 

Cully  is  a  small  village  on  the  margin  of  lake 
Leman,  between  Vevey  and  Lausanne.  Above 
it  rise  the  vine-covered  slopes  of  La  Vaux. 

NOTE  5,  Page  15 

The  Vies  des  Peres  du  desert  was  probably  the 
French  translation  made  in  the  early  part  of  the 
seventeenth  century  by  Rene  Gautier  from  the 
original  Latin  work,  Vita  Patrum,  sive  Historic 
Eremetica,  libri  X.  This  Acta  Sanctorum,  which 
was  published  at  Antwerp  in  1628,  by  P.  Herbert 
Rosweyde,  Jesuit,  contained  in  ten  books  all  the 
biographies  and  authentic  notices  of  the  fathers  of 
the  desert  which  Rosweyde  was  able  to  collect. 
The  Bollandists  afterwards  carried  out  more  fully 
the  original  design  of  the  Jesuit  father.  Among 
the  contents  of  the  Vitee  Patrum  are  the  lives  of 
the  chief  patriarchs  of  the  Thebaid,  written  by  St. 
Jerome,  St.  Athanasius,  St.  Ephrem,  and  others ; 
lives  of  holy  women ;  biographical  notices  by 
Ruffinus ;  maxims  and  examples  from  the  lives 
of  the  fathers  ;  the  Historic  Lausiaca,  written  by 
Palladius,  afterwards  Bishop  of  Helenopolis,  who 
visited  Egypt  in  about  390,  and  who  gives  a  nar- 
rative of  the  three  years  he  spent  among  the  her- 
mits ;  and  accounts  of  the  holy  hermits  of  Asia. 
Montalembert,  in  his  Monks  of  the  West,  speaks  of 
this  collection  as  "  one  of  the  noblest  of  existing 
books." 


ii4  NOTES 

NOTE  6,  Page  17 
This  lake  must  be  that  of  Neuchatel. 

NOTE  7,  Page  17 

The  river  Thiele,  or  Zihl,  connects  lake  Neu- 
chatel with  the  lake  of  Bienne. 

NOTE  8,  Page  22 

Compare    Matthew    Arnold  in    Tristram    and 

Iseult :  — 

"  Dear  saints,  it  is  not  sorrow,  as  I  hear, 
Not  suffering,  which  shuts  up  eye  and  ear 
To  all  that  has  delighted  them  before, 
And  lets  us  be  what  we  were  once  no  more. 
No,  we  may  suffer  deeply,  yet  retain 
Power  to  be  moved  and  soothed,  for  all  our  pain, 
By  what  of  old  pleased  us,  and  will  again." 

NOTE  9,  Page  25 

Compare  this  and  several  other  passages  of 
the  same  character,  in  which  Senancour  empha- 
sizes the  importance  of  living  according  to  the 
dictates  of  one's  own  nature,  with  the  following 
sentences  from  the  Meditations  of  Marcus  Aure- 
lius  :  — 

"  No  man  can  prevent  you  from  living  accord- 
ing to  the  principle  of  your  nature.  .  .  . 

"  Each  one  should  act  in  accordance  with  his 
natural  constitution.  .  .  . 


NOTES  115 

"  Think  nothing  of  importance  except  to  act 
as  your  nature  dictates,  and  to  bear  whatever  uni- 
versal nature  brings." 

Compare  also  these  lines  from  Emerson's  essay 
on  Self-Reliance:  — 

"No  law  can  be  sacred  to  me  but  that  of  my 
nature.  .  .  .  The  only  right  is  what  is  after  my 
constitution,  the  only  wrong  what  is  against  it." 

NOTE  10,  Page  28 

We  can  follow  Senancour's  trip  of  two  months, 
from  the  8th  of  July  to  the  3d  of  September, 
through  the  cantons  of  Vaud,  Neuchatel,  Berne, 
and  Fribourg,  to  the  Valais.  His  first  letter  was 
written  at  Geneva.  From  that  point  his  itinerary 
lay  along  the  northern  shore  of  lake  Leman 
through  Nyon  to  Lausanne,  which  covers  the 
slopes  of  Mont  Jorat.  Crossing  northward,  he 
went  to  Yverdun  by  way  of  Moudon,  then  to 
Neuchatel,  and  after  a  trip  through  the  Val  de 
Travers,  to  Saint-Blaise,  on  the  northeastern  point 
of  lake  Neuchatel,  and  to  Bienne.  He  stopped  for 
several  days  at  Thiel,  on  the  frontier  of  Neuchatel 
and  Berne,  and,  passing  by  lake  Morat,  went  south- 
ward to  Vevey,  through  Payerne.  Skirting  the 
eastern  end  of  lake  Leman,  he  visited  Clarens  and 
Chillon,  and  then  journeyed  on  to  Saint-Maurice, 
where  he  decided  to  make  his  home. 

I  have  not  followed  Senancour's  spelling  of 
Swiss  names,  as  it  is  frequently  incorrect. 


n6  NOTES 

NOTE  n,  Page  28 

Villeneuve  is  a  small,  ancient  town  on  the 
eastern  point  of  lake  Leman,  where  the  road 
leaves  the  borders  of  the  lake  and  enters  the 
valley  of  the  Rhone. 

NOTE  12,  Page  29 

This  narrow  gorge  is  described  by  Rogers  in 
Saint  Maurice  :  — 
*'  'T  was  dusk;  and  journeying  upward  by  the  Rhone, 

That  there  came  down  a  torrent  from  the  Alps, 

I  entered  where  a  key  unlocks  a  kingdom; 

The  road  and  river,  as  they  wind  alongf 

Filling  the  mountain-pass." 

NOTE  13,  Page  29 

The  bridge  of  Saint-Maurice  unites  the  can- 
tons of  Vaud  and  of  Valais.  With  its  one  arch, 
seventy  feet  wide,  it  spans  the  river,  which  is  here 
a  rapid  torrent,  and  rests  on  one  side  upon  the 
Dent  de  Morcles  and  on  the  other  side  upon  the 
Dent  du  Midi. 

NOTE  14,  Page  29 

The  town  to  which  Senancour  here  alludes  is 
that  of  Saint-Maurice. 

NOTE  15,  Page  43. 
Compare  the  Confessions  of  St.  Augustine,  in 


NOTES  117 

the  eleventh  book,  xi,  on  time  and  eternity  (ed- 
ited by  William  G.  T.  Shedd):  — 

"  Who  shall  hold  their  heart,  and  fix  it,  that  it 
be  settled  awhile,  and  awhile  catch  the  glory  of 
that  ever-fixed  Eternity,  and  compare  it  with  the 
times  which  are  never  fixed,  and  see  that  it  cannot 
be  compared ;  and  that  a  long  time  cannot  become 
long  but  out  of  many  motions  passing  by  ... 
but  that  in  the  Eternal,  nothing  passeth,  but  the 
whole  is  present  ?  .  .  .  Who  shall  hold  the  heart 
of  man,  that  it  may  stand  still,  and  see  how  eter- 
nity, ever  still-standing,  neither  past  nor  to  come, 
uttereth  the  times  past  and  to  come  ?  " 

NOTE  1 6,  Page  56 

The  masses  of  bare  sandstone  rock,  well  known 
as  the  gres  de  Fontainebleau^  give  to  the  forest 
much  of  its  picturesqueness.  Deep  valleys  and 
gorges  separate  the  long  ridges  of  sandstone,  and 
in  their  hollows  lie  piles  of  rocks  heaped  up  in 
rugged  masses. 

NOTE  17,  Page  62 

This  adventure,  which  happened  to  Senancour 
when  he  was  about  fifteen  or  sixteen  years  of  age, 
seems  to  have  left  a  deep  impression  on  his  mind, 
for  he  recurs  to  it  again  in  the  Meditations.  In 
his  preface  to  that  book,  he  declares,  in  order  to 
cover  his  own  identity,  that  he  discovered  the  man- 
uscript of  the  Meditations  in  the  rock-cave  of 


n8  NOTES 

the  forest  of  Fontainebleau,  and  he  calls  himself 
merely  the  editor  of  a  moral  treatise  which,  he 
suggests,  may  have  been  written  by  some  recluse- 
philosopher  who  had  lived  in  the  former  dwelling 
of  Lallemant,  the  poor  quarryman. 

NOTE  1 8,  Page  83 

Avon  is  the  only  village  within  the  precincts 
of  the  forest  of  Fontainebleau. 

NOTE  19,  Page  83 

Valvin,  Samoreau,  and  Samois  are  all  border 
forest-villages  situated  on  the  banks  of  the  Seine. 

NOTE  20,  Page  84 

Thomery,  which  lies  at  the  west  of  the  forest, 
by  the  banks  of  the  Seine,  is  a  village  of  gardens. 
It  is  surrounded  on  almost  every  side  by  vine- 
yards, which  yield  the  famous  Chasselas  grapes, 
and  by  orchards  and  gardens ;  its  streets  are  filled 
with  trees,  vines,  and  flowers,  hedges  of  roses,  and 
orchards  of  plum-trees. 

NOTE  21,  Page  84 

According  to  an  old  legend,  the  Grand  Veneur, 
the  terrible  spectre  huntsman,  haunted  the  forest, 
and  with  torch  and  hounds  followed  through  the 
night  a  spectre  stag  which,  like  an  ignis  fatuus,  ever 
allured  him  and  ever  eluded  him.  To  this  nightly 
ride  he  had  been  condemned  as  a  punishment  for 


NOTES  119 

an  offense  against  St.  Hubert.  It  was  this  phan- 
tom Chasseur  Noir  who  is  said  to  have  appeared 
to  Henry  IV  a  short  time  before  his  assassina- 
tion, and  to  have  uttered  the  words,  "Amendez 
vous ! " 

NOTE  22,  Page  85 

The  gorges  and  valley  of  Apremont  which  lie 
on  the  northwest  of  the  forest,  not  far  from  the 
now  famous  artist  village  of  Barbizon,  contain 
some  of  the  wildest  and  most  picturesque  scenery 
in  the  Fontainebleau  district. 

NOTE  23,  Page  85 

Beyond  Apremont  to  the  south  is  the  Hermi- 
tage of  Franchard,  now  solitary  and  abandoned, 
buried  in  rocks  and  sand,  and  lying  in  ruins  among 
the  hills.  The  monastery  was  founded  in  1197, 
by  monks  from  Orleans,  under  Philippe  Auguste. 
During  the  wars  of  the  fourteenth  century  it  was 
partially  destroyed,  and  was  afterwards  used  as  a 
stronghold  by  bands  of  brigands,  who  so  terrorized 
the  neighborhood  that  Louis  XIV  ordered  the 
ruins  to  be  razed  to  the  ground. 

NOTE  24,  Page  86 

Recloses,  la  Vignette,  and  Bourron  are  border 
forest-villages  on  the  south. 

NOTE  25,  Page  96 
There  is  every  reason  to  believe  that  this  story 


120  NOTES 

about  the  discovery  of  the  Manual  of  Pseusophanes 
is  fictitious  and  invented  by  Senancour,  who  doubt- 
less was  himself  the  author  of  the  Manual. 

I  have  to  acknowledge  with  sincere  thanks  the 
courtesy  of  M.  Barringer,  of  the  Bibliotheque  Na- 
tlonale  at  Paris,  who,  in  response  to  an  inquiry  as 
to  whether  there  exists,  in  that  library,  either  the 
defective  copy  of  Plutarch  or  the  fragment  of 
Aristippus,  referred  to  by  Senancour,  writes  :  — 

"  In  spite  of  my  most  minute  investigations  in 
the  Department  of  Printed  Books,  I  have  been 
unable  to  discover  the  slightest  trace  of  the  defec- 
tive copy  of  Plutarch  mentioned  by  Senancour. 
In  the  Department  of  Manuscripts,  M.  Omont 
went  through,  with  me,  all  the  inventories  and 
catalogues,  in  none  of  which  was  found  the  name 
of  Aristippus.  Under  such  circumstances,  I  think 
you  are  right  in  supposing  the  Manual  an  offspring 
of  Senancour' s  fertile  imagination.  .  .  .  Yours 
very  truly,  S.  S.  Barringer,  Bibliotkecaire" 

NOTE  26,  Page  99 

Compare  the  Confessions  of  St.  Augustine,  elev- 
enth book,  xvii,  xviii,  and  xx,  on  the  idea  of  time 
(edited  by  William  G.  T.  Shedd). 

"  Who  will  tell  me  that  there  are  not  three 
times,  past,  present,  and  future,  but  only  one,  the 
present,  because  those  two  are  not  ?  .  .  .  For  if 
times  past  and  to  come  be,  I  would  know  where 
they  be.  Which  yet  if  I  cannot,  yet  I  know 


NOTES  i2i 

wherever  they  be,  they  are  not  there  as  future,  or 
past,  but  present.  For  if  there  also  they  be  future, 
they  are  not  yet  there ;  if  there  also  they  be  past, 
they  are  no  longer  there.  .  .  .  What  now  is  clear 
and  plain  is,  that  neither  things  to  come,  nor  past, 
are.  Nor  is  it  properly  said,  c  There  be  three 
times,  past,  present,  and  to  come  : '  yet  perchance 
it  might  be  properly  said,  l  There  be  three  times ; 
a  present  of  things  past,  a  present  of  things  pre- 
sent, and  a  present  of  things  future.'  " 

Compare  also  the  following  from  the  Medita- 
tions of  Marcus  Aurelius  :  — 

"  The  present  is  the  same  for  all,  and  what  is 
lost  also  is  the  same  ;  for  what  escapes  us  is  only 
the  passing  moment.  Death  cannot  rob  us  of 
either  past  or  future ;  for  how  can  one  take  from 
a  man  what  he  has  not  ?  .  .  .  The  one  who  lives 
longest  and  the  one  who  dies  soonest  suffer  an 
equal  loss.  The  present  moment  is  all  that  either 
is  deprived  of,  since  that  is  all  he  has.  A  man 

cannot  part  with  what  he  does  not  possess." 

.« 

.   NOTE  27,  Page  102 

Le  Fanatisme,  ou  Mahomet  le  Prophete^  by  Vol- 
taire, second  act,  fourth  scene.  Mahomet  speak- 
ing to  his  lieutenant,  Omar  :  — 

"  Tu  sais  assez  quel  sentiment  vainqueur 
Parmi  mes  passions  regne  au  fond  de  mon  coeur. 
Charge  du  soin  du  monde,  environne  d'alarmes, 


122  NOTES 

Je  porte  1'encensoir,  et  le  sceptre,  et  les  armes  : 

Ma  vie  est  un  combat,  et  ma  frugalite 

Asservit  la  nature  a  mon  austerite. 

J'ai  banni  loin  de  moi  cette  liqueur  traitresse, 

Qui  nourrit  des  humains  la  brutale  mollesse  : 

Dans  des  sables  brulants,  sur  des  rochers  deserts, 

Je  supporte  avec  toi  1'inclemence  des  airs. 

L' amour  seul  me  console  ;  il  est  ma  recompense, 

L'objet  de  mes  travaux,  1'idole  que  j'encense, 

Le  dieu  de  Mahomet  ;  et  cette  passion 

Est  egale  aux  fureurs  de  mon  ambition.*' 


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